


The Perils of Prophecy Moppet

by Jennifer-Oksana (JenniferOksana)



Category: Alias (TV), Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Desperate Housewives, Everwood, Popular (TV), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alice in Wonderland References, Alternate Universe, Crack, Femslash, Fencing, Future, Girls Kissing, Good and Evil, Halloween, Het, High School, Humor, In-Jokes, Jokes, Kid Fic, Long Lost/Secret Relatives, Multi, Multiple Universes Colliding, Pregnancy, Samhain, Slash, Summer Camp, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-24
Updated: 2016-02-23
Packaged: 2018-05-22 06:26:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 34,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6068650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenniferOksana/pseuds/Jennifer-Oksana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The most entertaining tale of Rachael Pryce, a young woman cursed with an Evil Mother and a Good Father. Rachael will endure hardship upon hardship, thrilling adventures, encounters with figures from her parents' storied past, because she is, in fact, a Prophecy Moppet, complete with an overbearing narrator and frequent commentary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

**Chapter One: An Ominous Opening**

I must warn you in advance that the story you are about to embark on is neither happy nor particularly uplifting. Although the young heroine, Miss Rachael Pryce, is an exceptional young woman who combines in herself the best aspects of beauty, brains, charm, et cetera, and is the loved daughter of loving parents who are themselves extremely enjoyable people, her life is one of abject disaster. I'm afraid to report that this will be a story full of unfortunate events, conflicts, bad language, worse behavior, close shaves, and an ending that veers tragically close to self-parody and resolves very little in the way of universe-dividing fights.

In short, Miss Rachael Pryce and her friends are family are doomed by Fate to live in Interesting Times, and while these are much enjoyable to read about, I fear they are most uncomfortable to experience. So if you are in the least disturbed by the idea of a young woman cursed by fate and parents who are not entirely without a sense of humor about this, I must advise you to find a happier tale.

So let us begin, not quite at the beginning for Miss Rachael Pryce, but with her most remarkable parents, Mr. Pryce and Miss Morgan, and the unusual contract they signed that sealed her fate as one doomed to live in interested times as a Fated Person.

You see, Miss Pryce is the daughter of an Evil Mother and Good Father, and they quite resolved their own quarrels and moral differences by marrying and entirely escaping their foreordained tragic fates. How, you might ask as an astute reader, could that happen? A good question, but of course with an easy and simple answer. It was by means of that phenomenon that vexes all honest authors and their desires for all sorts of obvious, downbeat outcomes and causes the best-laid plans to be scuttled utterly: True Love.

Before, however, I explicate (that being a fancy word for explain) how True Love ruined the life of this young woman, it is my sad duty to tell the truth of Miss Pryce's very conception. The event itself took place during a particularly audacious quarrel between her parents that I will outline quickly, so as not to overly scandalize those who will be, anyway. Mrs. Pryce had seduced Mr. Pryce wearing braids and a schoolgirl outfit that a former lover of Mr. Pryce, Miss Burkle (whom you will be introduced to much later), had worn recently. It was done to make a point; as it turns out, the Pryces made far more than a point during the encounter.

Worse yet, it must be admitted that Mrs. Pryce was still Miss Morgan at the time! And of course, being well-read, you've all heard of Miss Morgan and her doings. I am deeply embarrassed to admit that all the stories about her are true and worse. Miss Morgan was a mean, vicious little sneak with a deplorable habit of sabotaging any plans the good guys hadn't locked up and triple-checked, and Mr. Pryce, being one of the aforementioned good guys, did not approve. He had fallen in with her during a time of great personal despair, when he himself had considered a conversion to Evil, and despite herself, Miss Morgan had not been able to finish the job. I suspect this had much to do with True Love, but as I cannot prove it, I will not say it's definitely the case, for that would be a logical fallacy of the worst sort.

In any case, even the case of accidental conception, True Love quickly became disaster not two days later, when Mr. Pryce rescued Miss Morgan from The Beast, an exceptionally stupid but very powerful demon monster who was attempting to destroy the city of Los Angeles in California. After an exciting escape through the bloody, zombie-filled law firm that ended with a fall into the sewer, Mr. Pryce had intended to leave Miss Morgan to her own devices and go back to the side of Good. While this may seem shocking and a little cold-hearted, especially for a Good man, Mr. Pryce did not mean it so. Miss Morgan was exceptionally clever and resourceful, and even bleeding to death in a sewer, had every chance of ending up alive and back on top. Others were not likely to be as lucky, including one Connor whom Miss Morgan (whose first name was Lilah) had informed Mr. Pryce (whose first name was Wesley) was still trapped inside the zombie-infested law firm.

However, Mr. Pryce then made a tragic mistake, which was to look deep into Miss Morgan's eyes before parting. He was then struck by a truth he had been pretending wasn't possible between them, which was that he was in love with Miss Morgan, and she with him. This made him realize that he was tired of lying about it to himself and others (by which I mean his true but rather judgmental friends who did not get on well with Miss Morgan because of her evil propensities), and that if she died, he would be brokenhearted.

"You must come back to the hotel with me," he told her firmly, for Mr. Pryce and his friends lived in a grand old hotel which had once housed a paranoia demon for fifty years. "Your stomach wound might become septic."

"But Wes..." said Miss Morgan, glad and terrified. She, being an honest person with insight into the human soul that she mostly used for bad purposes, had realized long before him that they were in love, but had not wanted to tell Wesley because Mr. Pryce wouldn't have approved of that. "I'm still Evil, even though I've lost my law firm."

"Damn it, Lilah," said Mr. Pryce passionately. "I'm not going to let you die down here, and that's final."

So it was that Mr. Pryce and Miss Morgan's clandestine affair was discovered by everyone and Miss Burkle was so angry that she stopped speaking to Mr. Pryce, which made him very tired of being at the hotel. Thus, when Miss Morgan discovered not three weeks later that she was going to have a baby, Mr. Pryce made another decision.

"We'll leave LA," he said, lying next to her on the oldest, creakiest mattress in the hotel. Angel, who was Mr. Pryce's boss, had unwillingly let Miss Morgan have sanctuary in the hotel, but had put her in the mustiest, dirtiest room in the place, with a saggy, creaky mattress that squeaked, and a dresser with only one working drawer. Mr. Pryce, disgusted, had moved himself into the room in protest, and he thought that with Miss Morgan in it, it was not so very bad, even with the waterspots on the ugly striped wallpaper.

"And go where? All of our -- oh wait, your -- friends are here...and if you hadn't noticed, big-time apocalypse in progress," Miss Morgan pointed out pragmatically. Even though she was evil, Miss Morgan was quite practical, and saw that asking Mr. Pryce to turn against his friends would be cruel, and she loved him too much to cause him unnecessary pain. "Not that I wouldn't like it. You, me, new town...new ways to be bad..."

"Angel can handle the apocalypse," Mr. Pryce said, ignoring her evil blandishments, which were far too common to attract him much. "They'll get the bad guys with or without us. And thanks to your quick thinking, the sun was not put out, and the Beast is on the run."

"Yeah, and you saw the thanks I got for that," Miss Morgan said softly.

"Which is why I think we should leave LA," Mr. Pryce said. "We'll get married in Las Vegas, and then choose a place to live from there."

"No," said Miss Morgan decisively. "We can't because I'm still Evil, and you're still Good. Even if we can compromise about that and make it together as a couple, how would we raise the baby?"

I have mentioned that Miss Morgan was always the most practical woman of her type, and Mr. Pryce was almost as practical, though the idea of having a baby of his very own had made him feel very romantic and hope that perhaps, Miss Morgan was willing to compromise a tiny bit about being Evil. Still, he understood that some choices are not to be changed so easily, and he nodded, pleased at her honesty. Miss Morgan, though evil, was always very honest. It was one of her better qualities.

"We'll make a very serious contract," he said. "We will raise our child in a home of strict neutrality and skepticism, so that she may make her own choices. We can continue to practice our lifestyles..."

"Well, that's a given," Miss Morgan replied, smiling at him wickedly. Mr. Pryce smiled back and laced his fingers around hers where they lay over her stomach. "Do you think we can do it?"

Mr. Pryce considered her, again very seriously. "I think we've been surprisingly honest, given our circumstances," he pointed out, curling a strand of her hair around his finger. "And I love you. Why shouldn't it work?"

"You love me?" she asked, suddenly electrified, even her black and evil heart touched by his simple declaration. "Then, yes. Yes, we'll make a contract, because I love you, too. And now that you've been honest despite yourself..."

As I said and will continue to remind you, Miss Morgan was hopelessly evil, and part of that was being very opportunistic. She immediately took the opportunity to show Mr. Pryce just how delighted she was that he had admitted aloud to being in love, and Mr. Pryce discovered that he really had very little to regret about it. True Love has that effect sometimes, which makes it damnably tricky to stop when it's already had time to move in and take over.

Two days later, they were married. Three days later, they made a very serious contract, which both signed in blood. Four days later, they were on the road in Mrs. Pryce's Mercedes convertible to Winnetka, Illinois, where they had agreed to live as neutral territory, having tossed their fates (Miss Morgan to die horribly a month later, stabbed by a goddess-in-embryo, drained by an evil vampire, and then beheaded by Mr. Pryce, and Mr. Pryce to forget all this, fall in love with Miss Burkle who would then die, and then to himself die one very terrible day) to the wind without a thought for them, assuming that fate was done with them. This, of course, was a bad assumption.

For Fate, I'm afraid to say, will not be denied, even by True Love, because True Love is a Twinkie defense.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two: The Dangerous Destiny**

A suburb on the North Shore of Chicago, Illinois, Winnetka is an attractive, well-appointed place where the houses are all large, expensive, and largely made of brick. It is also close to a commuter train station, so Miss Morgan, now Mrs. Pryce after a hurried wedding in Reno, could easily reach her job once she got once after the birth of the baby, and Mr. Pryce could use their one rather shabby car to drive to his job at Northwestern University, where he'd easily gotten a position as a Professor of Classics. This meant he taught undergraduates to read Antique Latin and Greek, which they often felt very ungrateful about, and taught special seminars in the magic of the Etruscans, which raised eyebrows among the faculty but was much more popular with students.

Mr. Pryce, who was Professor Pryce at the university, was very popular in any case because he was a handsome man who looked good with a bit of five-o-clock shadow, and now that Mrs. Pryce had the charge of his wardrobe, had a bit of flair to his clothing that matched his bearing. He also (having been born in England, though at times he claimed Maryland for the sake of appearances) had a British accent, which of course is the sexiest accessory a thin, aristocratic-looking man can command. Mrs. Pryce, who was spending the remainder of her pregnancy playing at housewife and finding it almost as horrible as being chased by a murderous monster through a zombie-infested law firm, took a little comfort in knowing everyone could love him, but she had him and that was that.

(Later, she would discover the joys of comparative housewifery from a woman by name of Bree Van de Kamp, but Bree has not yet found the proper moment to introduce herself to the story, and Bree is concerned with propriety, so we'll leave it at that.)

One morning, after Mrs. Pryce had kissed Mr. Pryce on the forehead and sent him off to the university, she found herself digging up her flower beds for the fourth time in a month, in part because she'd discovered gardening was comforting (influence of Mrs. Van de Kamp) and in part to hide some incriminating evidence, when a very tall Anglo-Saxon Messenger arrived. Now, as anyone who's read her _Alice_ knows, Anglo-Saxon Messengers have Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, and Mrs. Pryce had of course read her _Alice_ as a matter of fact.

So she doffed her hat, very politely took the message from him, and watched as he went on his way, joyfully wriggling and quite surprising the neighbors, who had not, I fear, read their _Alice_ the way the Mrs. Pryce had. But one cannot be the former head of an evil law firm whose purpose is extinguishing the life of a souled vampire without having read the proper books, so she was not disturbed in the least.

Until she read the message, which changed her entire demeanor in seconds flat, otherwise known as immediately.

When Mr. Pryce came home at five-thirty pleased by another successful day of Classics professoring, he found Mrs. Pryce sitting at their dining room table, her head resting in her hands.

"Are you all right?" he asked with sudden alarm. "Is something wrong with the baby?"

"Read the letter," Mrs. Pryce said grimly. Mr. Pryce did as his wife said, and when he was finished, he understood completely why she was so disheartened. For the letter was from a joint committee of Senior Partners (who were Mrs. Pryce's ultimate employers) and Powers that Be (who were Mr. Pryce's ultimate employers), and they were quite vexed at the Pryces, who were supposed to have died quite tragically for their respective causes, and now were bringing a child into the world in the suburbs.

This was a completely unacceptable development, said they. It threw off balance, and cheated fate, and things that were simply inconvenient for all the forces involved.

However, after much wrangling, there was a compromise (based as much on amusement value as anything real). While the Pryces were immediately and eternally fired from their positions in the eternal, fixed order of things, the child had the unfortunate luck to be Extremely Fated. That meant that when apocalypses, interesting events, et cetera, came about, they would often center on the baby. This seemed very inimical to the Pryces' solemn contract that their baby would be raised Neutral in the great battles, and both were immediately distressed at this conclusion.

"That's a bit unexpected," Mr. Pryce said, sitting down. "Are you sure you're all right?"

"No, I'm not all right," Mrs. Pryce said angrily. "I don't want a prophecy moppet! I wanted a normal kid, a nice home, a garden where I could bury the proof, and then **this** damn thing shows up. Is there any way to ignore it, Wes? Or refuse it?"

"Let me think," Mr. Pryce said acerbically, which meant that he was as upset as Mrs. Pryce by this unexpected turn of events, and had no idea how to convey that to his very pregnant and very moody wife. "No, I don't think there's much we can do except stick to the contract firmly. If Fate wants our child, then it'll have to wait until she's an adult and can choose for herself. But it will be a fight, I think."

Mrs. Pryce, her hand on her belly, smiled at her husband. "Thanks, Wes. Glad to know wait and see is an option," she said sarcastically. "Ow! She kicked me again."

"She?" Mr. Pryce asked. "Do you think it's a girl?"

"Of course I do," Mrs. Pryce said with a wicked arch to her grin. "How else could she combine all of our best qualities into one child? After all, that's what this new prophecy says, poor baby."

Indeed, Mr. Pryce had almost forgotten that the Anglo-Saxon Messenger's message had informed the parents-to-be that their daughter would be the best and worst of them in one small package, which meant that while she was destined to be clever, charming, resourceful, beautiful, honest, and determined, she would also be selfish, devious, vain, moody, and have poor taste in love. Of course, she would be a girl, and exactly one week later, Mrs. Pryce's prognostication, which means an idea she'd had for almost nine months and had only told Mr. Pryce once the message came, came true. Rachael Elizabeth Pryce was born with the usual mess and noise of new babies, and her parents were both immediately in love with her.

This, of course, caused some problems because their solemn contract to be Strictly Neutral in raising their prophecy moppet was strained at the very sight of her. Mr. Pryce, the proudest father in the world, imagined wistfully his daughter reading Etruscan magic and using it to fix the hole in the ozone layer or some such thing. Mrs. Pryce, playing peek-a-boo, dreamed of the day she could teach Rachael how to artfully make a murder look like a suicide at worst and more likely, an unfortunate accident. Indeed, much of their discussion once young Rachael was asleep concerned what Strictly Neutral actually meant, and led to a number of fights, rows, and quarrels over childrearing.

Now, at this point, it seems a good moment to introduce Mrs. Pryce's first mentor in living a proper suburban life, Bree Van de Kamp. Mrs. Pryce was first impressed by Mrs. Van de Kamp when she brought over a welcome basket of color-coded gift certificates, two dozen healthful muffins, and fresh flowers grown in her own garden. She quickly learned that in the art of suburban warfare, Bree was a formidable foe and gracious and gallant ally.

"Organization is key," Mrs. Van de Kamp explained to her new friend over herbal teas. "Gracious living is deeply unappreciated, but one must do one's best, and hide the evidence deep."

"Or as we used to put it at my law firm, the devil's in the details," Mrs. Pryce agreed, stirring in a spoonful of raw sugar for her tea. "Have you ever considered moonlighting, Bree?"

"For Wolfram and Hart?" Mrs. Van de Kamp in a voice that must be described as faintly disappointed. "That's rather nouveau riche, isn't it? One's personal pursuits should be kept private out of love, instead of being used to finance a second life."

"Perhaps," said Mrs. Pryce, a cordial chill cooling her words and her tea. "Yet, I find having friends is never a waste of time in the long run. It's all part of having a good backup plan, in case things get too complicated."

It was the beginning of a long and complicated friendship, as the strength of Mrs. Pryce and Mrs. Van de Kamp's competitive mettles provided hours of entertainment for both when their respective marriages were not under strain, as the Pryces found itself over its Strict Neutrality.

By the time Rachael was four, as a matter of fact, fights had outnumbered the happy moments, and Mr. Pryce was always in a temper and cruel, and Mrs. Pryce looked wan and worn out, which meant she spent her evenings mixing poisons and gardening potions, plotting evil, and thinking of ways to abscond with her daughter. Things might have gone to pieces, in fact, if a bit of fateful luck had not gone in the Pryce's favor for the first time in months.

An older couple moved in across the street from the Pryces, ones whose Interesting Destinies had come, gone, and left their welts. Their names were Jack and Irina Bristow, and unlike the Van de Kamps (who Mr. Pryce despised as a matter of course, and Mrs. Pryce enjoyed for the competitive angles), the Pryces liked the Bristows immediately. This for two reasons: first, they were very likable people, and secondly, because they were Interesting people who were very much like the Pryces in their life histories.

Once upon a time, it seems, the Bristows had been the best spies in the entire world, fated to have an ill-starred love affair, and now they had a grown-up daughter called Sydney Bristow-Vaughn-Tippin-Sloane-Vaughn, and Mrs. Bristow had another daughter, Nadia Santos-Weiss (who sadly is not nearly as important in our story as Sydney, which is a pity given Nadia is a much more pleasant person than her sister). Sydney, it seemed, had apparently assumed their mantle, which meant that she had grown up and become an even better spy than her mother and father because it was her destiny. So now, after decades of love-hate based on their daughter, including Mr. Bristow's ill-starred love affair with Nadia during a period when Mrs. Bristow had been dead, they were free of destiny and quite happily united.

This unity was quickly discovered by the weary and war-wounded Mrs. Pryce, after one too many conversations with Irina Derevko-Bristow, had discovered that more importantly, Sydney Bristow-Vaughn-Tippin-Sloane-Vaughn was, like Rachael, a prophecy moppet herself, and urged Mr. Pryce to listen to the Bristows. For the sake of their marriage, because the Pryces had become excessively fond of each other due to the peskiness of True Love, and the thought of losing each other, even for so important cause as their daughter's future moral orientation, seemed an unfortunate sacrifice.

Rachael, of course, knew nothing of this, because it was too soon for her to know it. She knew that Uncle Jack, while rather scary sometimes, was a very nice man who would show her all sorts of interesting books when she went over while Mother and Father were having a quarrel, and that Aunt Irina was never too busy to read her a story and tell her she looked very much like her Sydney at that age. This was not really true, because Rachael had dark brown hair that curled slightly and blue-grey eyes, while Sydney's hair was lighter and her eyes darker, but as all little girls and all little prophecy moppets look a bit alike, Aunt Irina might be forgiven for her fib.

Uncle Jack and Aunt Irina realized very quickly that Mr. and Mrs. Pryce were having marital difficulties over their contract, and being old veterans in the art of marital difficulties caused by moral differences, came up with a plan of action. This is mostly because they felt their estrangement to be rather unpleasant and didn't think it needed to be repeated ad infinitum. After some consultation with Mrs. Van de Kamp, they implemented the plan as stealthily as possible, so the Pryces didn't realize they were being manipulated.

Aunt Irina, who was also an Evil Mother, made special friends with Mr. Pryce, and Uncle Jack grew very close to Mrs. Pryce. Now at first, it might seem more practical that Aunt Irina befriend Mrs. Pryce and Uncle Jack Mr. Pryce, but there was a deeper strategy involved. You see, Uncle Jack had been betrayed by Aunt Irina, and it had made him bitter and miserable about Evil Mothers, and they feared Mr. Pryce might believe the only way to handle Mrs. Pryce was to get rid of her and raise Rachael by herself, which had been the mistake Uncle Jack and Aunt Irina had made with their daughter.

Likewise, Aunt Irina was devious and clever, and could explain very clearly to Mr. Pryce why it would be disastrous for Rachael not to know her mother, for it had quite damaged Sydney and led to an obsession with the absolute **worst** men she could fall in love with. Uncle Jack set himself to explaining why Mrs. Pryce should see the benefit in remaining strictly neutral, flattering her sense of competence (for Mrs. Pryce was very proud of her ability to commit Evil while seeming a normal wife and mother who ran a small business on the side, and Uncle Jack agreed she should be) and appealing to her logic and integrity.

It took the Bristows four months, because Mr. and Mrs. Pryce were **very** angry at each other, and more stubborn than anyone could imagine. But for Rachael's fifth birthday, she got what was the best present of all. Instead of Mother looking tired and tearful, she had a bright glow to her face, and was dressed to the nines, which means she was wearing a beautiful green dress that flattered her very much and made her look ten years younger. She was accompanied by Father, who had remembered to shave, and had one arm around Mother and the other holding a large present wrapped in pink-and-white balloon paper.

"About time," Aunt Irina said, fixing the bow in Rachael's hair. "Do you think you'd like a little brother for your sixth birthday, darling?"

"Don't be silly," Rachael said sternly. "There will be no little brothers in this story, Aunt Irina. I don't want any!"

Rachael, of course, was destined to be very wrong about this, but that is a matter for a much later chapter. It is enough to say that for the time being, Mr. and Mrs. Pryce were reconciled, and the Pryce home was filled with domestic felicity, love, and many visits from their dear friends, the Bristows.

Now, of course, I have said this is a story of misery and woe, and things did not long stay as they were. One day, when Rachael was seven, Uncle Jack and Aunt Irina were recalled to Los Angeles at the request of their daughter Sydney Bristow-Vaughn-Tippin-Sloane-Vaughn on the occasion of her wedding, and as you know, Los Angeles was the one place in the entire world that the Pryces had decided they could never go. So even though there were many kisses and tears and promises to visit, the Bristows knew that by the terms of the Pryce Contract, they would most likely never see her again.

Still, things continued on for Rachael Pryce, who was still blissfully unaware that being the daughter of an Evil Mother and a Good Father, she was fated for Great and Terrible Things. Mr. and Mrs. Pryce kept their secret well, and Rachael was raised Strictly Neutral, which meant one day she stuck bubblegum in the hair of her worst enemy, Cecilia Palomino, and her father scolded her for doing such a naughty thing, and her mother scolded her for getting caught.

The next day, when she befriended young Timothy Spalding, her father praised her for being nice to a boy with no friends, and her mother praised her for being nice to the son of the richest man in town. And so on and so forth, until, at last, Destiny came barging in.

And of course, it came at the worst possible time of all: Homecoming the year Rachael turned fifteen. As I have warned you, things only get more and more interesting and dangerous as Rachael's life continues along -- and her parents' peaceful life as well. So if you would like to leave our heroine in this relatively peaceful if slightly melancholic point, which means bittersweetly sad because Aunt Irina and Uncle Jack have left Winnetka and Rachael's life for good, then I advise you to do so.

Because things are looking worse from here.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three: The Harrowing Homecoming**

Earlier, when I said that Winnetka was chosen for its neutrality, I was only partially accurate. This of course means that other reasons, not particularly important to the narrative, caused the Pryces to choose Winnetka, one of them being an excellent school system. (There was also the small matter of Mrs. Pryce being a devoted fan of an alternative rock singer named Liz Phair and one of her songs, "Flower," because of a particular line she enjoyed singing at the top of her lungs when she was in a bad mood at her evil law firm, which was approximately once an hour.) During a happy hour of browsing the Internet, Mrs. Pryce discovered Liz Phair had attended New Trier High School, and after that, that New Trier was an impressive place to attend high school.

Mr. Pryce had agreed, given the number of academic positions in the Chicagoland area, and off they had gone to the Midwest and its all-American charms.

All of this backstory is merely to explain that when Rachael Pryce turned fourteen, she began attending New Trier, and being both good-looking and smart, quickly found herself to be a very popular girl. Popular enough, in fact, to be nominated for Sophomore Homecoming Princess in her second year of school, where we resume our story.

Those few people who were not fond of Rachael, because I'm afraid to say that no one is universally liked, even those as charming as Rachael, claimed it was because Mrs. Pryce had pull, which means that she was not only PTA President, she had recently been appointed to school board, thanks to Mrs. Van de Kamp's recent withdrawal due to a new and frightening illness of stomachaches and dry heaves.

It is my sad duty to admit the rumors had a grain of truth. Mrs. Pryce had cheated outrageously to beat her great friend and rival, Mrs. Van de Kamp, and gain a seat on the school board after her loss in the general election. Not only was Mrs. Pryce eternally ambitious in the matter of one-upping (which means to beat in small, petty contests that guarantee retaliation and something to do when the tedium of everyday life was too much) Mrs. Van de Kamp, she thought school board would be a nice launching pad for political aspirations later.

Also, Mrs. Pryce was worried about spending too much time at home, as neighborhood gossip was particularly pleased to focus on her, and whose roses grew on a number of Evil deeds and ate for breakfast all sorts of incriminating evidence. Besides which, rumor was always alleging that Mrs. Pryce was having an affair with Mr. Pryce's department head, Professor Quigley Q. Quintus, the Severus Snape Chair of Classics at Northwestern University. This was a foul rumor, and not true. Quigley Q. Quintus was a particular enemy of the Pryces as it was, and Rachael dreaded those three nights a year when he was invited to the Pryce home. What Rachael didn't know was that Mr. Pryce hated Quigley Q. Quintus more than both Mrs. Pryce and Rachael did put together, for Quigley Q. Quintus had something distinctly rude about Mrs. Pryce, which means that he had suggested that Mrs. Pryce was vulgarly unfaithful to her husband besides being a modern day Lucrezia Borgia.

Lucrezia Borgia, as you know, was the daughter of a very famous pope in Renaissance Italy, and had many husbands, and was often accused of not only poisoning them, but having affairs with her father the Pope and her brother Rodrigo. While current scholarship disagrees to her levels of evil, her name remains a watchword for a dangerous woman and it is in no way a polite thing to call the wife of one's colleague.

Mr. Pryce did not mind calling Mrs. Pryce his "beloved, viperous Lucrezia" on a daily basis, because she was the most accomplished lady poisoner since Ms. Borgia, but he would not have any other man calling his wife vulgar names, and had he not been chair of the department and ninety-one years old, Mr. Pryce would have beaten him with a stick (most likely, a sword-shaped stick) and his fists for the insults. Quigley Q. Quintus knew that, in the way all very old and unpleasant men do, and he took great delight in insinuating that Mrs. Pryce spent her days doing unspeakable things for money and training Rachael in the same arts.

"It's in the line, you see," he'd hiss in an insidious (which means that while it was absurd and untrue at first, it gave one shameful doubts later on) whisper. "And you can see the mother in her. A shame, really. Quite a shame."

All this meant for Mrs. Pryce, sadly, was that when she gained her ill-earned seat on the school board, she was not inclined to feel the least remorse for it, and often thought of Professor Quigley Q. Quintus and the herbs, powders, and draughts in her attic apartment that she might use to hasten his overdue demise. Worse yet, despite the contract of Strict Neutrality, this might in fact be a moment when the very Good Mr. Pryce might dabble momentarily in Evil, given the ugliness of Professor Quigley Q. Quintus's insinuations against Mrs. Pryce's tattered honor.

But these murderous machinations were muted when Mrs. Pryce discovered Rachael had been nominated for Sophomore Homecoming Princess. Mrs. Pryce and Rachael were both supremely vain, and Rachael discovered that Mrs. Pryce adored spending money on cosmetics, clothing, and hair. Rachael discovered that her very dark hair, which was brown but almost black, curled prettily around her face, and that her blue-grey eyes were absolutely enchanting when her eyelashes were covered in mascara and a smudge of power with a little sparkle applied.

"Do you think I'll win, Mom?" Rachael asked, staring at herself in the mirror. This was her way of asking Mrs. Pryce if she had cheated in the pursuit of Rachael's throne. While Rachael was not entirely aware that she was a prophecy moppet, she was aware that her father was Good and her mother Evil, and that for some reason, her mother was not supposed to be too Evil in front of Rachael and vice versa.

"We'll see, won't we?" Mrs. Pryce replied airily, which was her way of answering that she hadn't, because she felt Rachael had a fine chance of winning on her own. "Let's try that blush over there, okay, babe?"

Of course, as I have indicated, disaster and firestorm followed Rachael Pryce around like a disheveled stray puppy because she was a prophecy moppet, to use her mother's expressively disdainful phrase, and it had waited fifteen years to get its first shot at her. Now, while Mrs. Pryce's poisoning of Mrs. Van de Kamp had been very inappropriate despite the larger context of their relationship, and Professor Quigley Q. Quintus's comments had filled Mr. and Mrs. Pryce with feelings of foreboding, which means that they were certain that very soon, bad things would befall themselves and their beloved daughter, nothing bad had yet happened.

So on Homecoming night, Mrs. Pryce and Rachael dressed themselves splendidly, because it turned out that Rachael had won Sophomore Homecoming Princess, in dresses that didn't match, but instead complimented each other, because, said Mrs. Pryce, "we're not tedious suburban bourgeoisie" even though Mrs. Pryce had been playing that role to the hilt for the past fifteen years and seven months. A professional hairdresser had done their hair, Rachael's in ringlets and Mrs. Pryce in a chignon, which is a form of twist like a French twist but not a French twist, and Mrs. Pryce had found a necklace of hers she'd worn back when she was rich and super-powerful, sparkling diamonds and emeralds, which she'd put on Rachael instead of herself.

They were on their way to New Trier when they got the phone call. Mrs. Pryce answered, expecting it to be Mr. Pryce, who was supposed to meet them there, wearing his tuxedo.

"Hey, handsome," said Mrs. Pryce warmly, assuming it was her husband. "Who is this? Who the HELL is this?"

Rachael was shocked. Being brought up Strictly Neutral, her mother rarely swore in front of her, because it was a bad habit. But then, looking at her mother, it was as though Rachael were seeing a stranger. Mrs. Pryce was deadly pale, because at that moment she was being informed that her husband had been kidnapped by Quigley Q. Quintus and his powerful posse, the Quintivium, a group of elderly classics professors who were very jealous of Mr. Pryce's popularity. They had discovered while torturing him that Mrs. Pryce was none other than the famous Miss Morgan, and now they had a demand. They would return Mr. Pryce if Miss Morgan would assist them in their evil aims, and brought her daughter along with her to raised in the ways of Evil.

"You listen to me," Mrs. Pryce hissed angrily, her face red with rage and worry. "When I find you, you treacherous old bastard, I am going to make you **wish** you'd never heard of Miss Lilah Morgan. I will peel your toes from your feet like grapes and feed them to my dog, you sick son of a bitch."

With that, Mrs. Pryce ended the call and slammed on the gas. "Hold on, Prophecy Moppet," Mrs. Pryce said, quite surprising Rachael with the almost-loving nickname. "We have a new and exciting mission today, which is to rescue your father from the Classics Department thugs who figured out who you are."

"What do you mean?" Rachael asked. "Professor Quintus already knows I'm Daddy's daughter, doesn't he?"

"Oh, God," said Mrs. Pryce, with a sigh that signified her surrender to the whimsical forces of destiny. "You listen, I talk. There are things you have to know."

On their way to one of Mrs. Pryce's secret weapons cachets, which she had established throughout the North Shore, Rachael got a quick lesson in her conception, destiny, and the ramifications of her parentage, which is to say she found out that she was a Prophecy Moppet, that her Evil Mother and Good Father had significant problems with this, and that Fate was out to get her. To say the least, Rachael was surprised.

"Me? But it can't be me! I'm normal!" Rachael cried as they loaded weapons into the trunk of the car. "Why did you and Daddy do this to me? Why do you like to see me in pain?"

"Do this to you? If we hadn't _done this_ to you, you wouldn't be here," Mrs. Pryce said. "Now stop your whining and help me, damn it. Or I'll leave you here, moppet, and you will be BORED and not Homecoming Princess. Besides, violence is a lot more fun than your dad and I let on. You'll like it, especially when you can use it for a good cause."

One might suspect this was Mrs. Pryce using the situation to persuade Rachael toward Evil, but you would be wrong. Mrs. Pryce was aware that it was suicidal to go into the high school without backup, and she suspected Rachael had those martial skills that all prophecy moppets have, which meant that she could win in a fight without much training at all. However, it had been a while since Mrs. Pryce had used a gun, so she gave Rachael a very big knife while taking a flamethrower and a small gun for herself, leaving Mr. Pryce's favored weapon, which was a double-barreled shotgun, in the trunk.

"This is crazy!" Rachael cried, watching as her mother looked at the locked doors to New Trier, and opened the large shoulder bag she'd gotten from the shed. "Are you going to blow up the school? We could get in trouble! I could get expelled!"

"It can't be helped, honey," said Mrs. Pryce, taking out a bit of plastic explosive, sticking it on the lock, and blowing the doors open. "Come on, we don't have much time."

"To save Dad? How do you know?" Rachael asked, jogging along next to her mother, whose smile had gone from charming to malicious and frightening with the first explosive she'd set.

"To save Dad and make the half-time ceremonies? I have a watch, see?" Mrs. Pryce said, turning the corner. "This way."

It should be said that the reason Mrs. Pryce knew where to find Mr. Pryce was because they had, long ago, constructed ingenious devices to track each other in case of emergency. After all, being former personages of mild importance, and having a prophecy moppet for a daughter, it was entirely reasonable to believe people like Quigley Q. Quintus would exist and make a play for one or the other of them. This meant that it was important to have a way for one parent to locate the other at all times. Thus, in the Pryce's left ankles were tracking devices embedded into the ink of very pale tattoos that no one would ever see without a blacklight. When used with one of the watches such as Mrs. Pryce was carrying, they worked as perfect, nearly untraceable trackers.

"This is unreal!" Rachael whined. As I've said, while Rachael was clever and determined, she was also selfish, stubborn, and not fond of exerting herself. She was also very scared to see her mother turn from doting social mother into a violent criminal over the course of thirty-five minutes. This was not the way her homecoming was supposed to have gone, and so Rachael whined. "You guys are playing a joke on me!"

Mrs. Pryce stopped, grabbed Rachael's shoulder, and before Rachael could say another word, slapped her daughter across the mouth hard. Hysterics and prophecy moppets, in Mrs. Pryce's worldview, needed to be treated much the same way.

"Listen to me," she said sternly. "This is not a joke and if you don't stop bitching at me RIGHT NOW, I'll slap you until you can't see. You're putting your father's life at risk, Rachael. So stop whining and get ready to throw a bomb or two if needed."

Rachael, shocked, followed along, with the vague germ of an idea that she would complain to Mr. Pryce if this did all turn out to be a ruse, which meant that she was not entirely convinced, even by her mother's militancy, that there were evil classics professors trying to kill her father. As was rather practical, if wrong, of Rachael.

Her doubts were shattered when Mrs. Pryce, after using two explosives, kicked open a basement door to the laughter of the evil Professor Quigley Q. Quintus and the rest of the gang, the Quintivium. As the name suggests, quintus meaning five in Latin (approximately), there were five of them, and they had Mr. Pryce chained to a table, gagged, and looking quite put out.

"Wesley!" Mrs. Pryce said. "Okay, who wants a piece of my fucking flamethrower? Come on, Quigley. Got something to say?"

"Mom!" Rachael cried. "Swearing!"

"We're in the middle of a battle, Rachael. It's the appropriate time to fucking swear," Mrs. Pryce said, shooting a little flame toward a knife-wielding Quigley Q. Quintus. "Let my husband go or I'll deal some great vengeance and furious anger upon you. I'm warning you!"

Mrs. Pryce, back when she was Miss Morgan and considerably eviler than she was allowed to be under the contract, had been a fan of the movie Pulp Fiction, which had featured a character named Jules, who quoted a false verse (Ezekiel 25:17) of the Bible that used the phrase great vengeance and furious anger. It reminded Mr. Pryce that at the time, he had been just as good at not being captured by the bad guys, and so while Mrs. Pryce battled with Quigley Q. Quintus, he looked at Rachael, who was absolutely terrified and not doing much with her knife. After a moment, Rachael looked back, and Mr. Pryce gently encouraged her, with smiles and quick gestures, to rummage through her mother's bag of tricks and find a Skeleton Key.

Even Rachael, with her relative lack of knowledge, knew what to do with that, and so within moments, Mr. Pryce had joined Mrs. Pryce in her desperate fight against the Quintivium, because while Mrs. Pryce was very good with a flamethrower, five against one is hardly a fair fight. Two against five, when both are as good with a weapon as the Pryces and the five are old, bitter Classics professors?

Will inevitably result in a much shorter fight.

Mr. Pryce then took great pleasure in pummeling Quigley Q. Quintus at long last, and when the old man collapsed, Mr. Pryce said in a loud voice, "and that'll teach you to say rude things about my wife and my daughter!" which melted Mrs. Pryce's heart and caused her to jump on Mr. Pryce, throw her arms around him, cover him with kisses and yell to Rachael, "Go! We'll...catch up."

True to their word, the Pryces were there to see Rachael crowned Homecoming Princess, although it was true that she was the most disheveled, which means that her pretty curls had fallen out and she was dusty and dirty from the boiler room. But even in this moment of glorious victory, failure and tragedy found a new way to make Rachael and her parents miserable in the form of a zero-tolerance policy. Two days after the big game, Rachael was expelled from New Trier without appeal, for using weapons on school property, and Mrs. Pryce was fired from the school board and the PTA. This meant that Mrs. Pryce's new job would be to home-school Rachael, home schooling being a particularly odious punishment for Evil Mothers who have used necessary but inappropriate explosives on school property.

Mrs. Pryce used the opportunity of her expulsion as PTA president to use all the words she'd been saving up for a special occasion on the politics and policies of New Trier and Winnetka public education in general, and Mrs. Van de Kamp, who was feeling surprisingly better thanks to a few words from Mr. Pryce about not poisoning the neighbors, enjoyed every minute of it as she presided over the removal of her rival. The students who attended were all very impressed, and Rachael became more popular than ever with the wrong crowd.

"Did you have to use the word _fuck_ so many times, Mom?" Rachael asked at the door of the auditorium when the Pryce family left New Trier for the last time. She had realized that there was no going back, not after her mother's swan song to her respectable life as a school board member and PTA president in a flurry of violence, cursing, and vicious remarks.

"Language," Mr. Pryce said vaguely, rather surprised at how creatively Mrs. Pryce had taken her leave of them, which means he was boggled at the cursing and screaming. "You're not an adult and your mom can take care of herself."

"What about me? Can you two take care of me?" Rachael asked. "I hate being a Prophecy Moppet. And I hate both of you! You've ruined my life!"

And of course, Rachael ran away from the school with tears running down her face, quite convinced that she would never be normal and that her parents were out to get her. I wish I could tell you that this was untrue, but as the next chapters will reveal, both are very true and Miss Pryce's misfortunes are only likely to increase now that she was aware of her special and cursed status.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four: The Marital Meddlers**

For many in this go-go-go modern world, the choice to home school is an ethical and critical one, which means that either cynicism re: reforming City Hall is at an all-time high, or there's simply not enough Jesus in the public school. But for our heroine and her mother, home schooling was a punishment doled out by a vengeful school board and a disgruntled principal who was dismayed his PTA president had shown the student populace that vandalism was fun.

Rachael, who I fear did not think vandalism was any fun _at all_ , and Mrs. Pryce, who certainly _did_ , both felt the principal was using them as a scapegoat, and that their punishment was incommensurate with their crimes. Nonetheless, their avenues of appeal were deeply limited given the evidence, and thus they reluctantly began tedious home study together.

Of course, their punishment was even more punishing because of Rachael's adolescent fits, which meant that her hormones had decided to addle her brains. So any look, joke, or barbed comment from Mrs. Pryce sent Rachael into cascades of tears, and eventually, her father's study to complain.

Mr. Pryce had found himself Chair of the Classics Department upon his beating of Professor Quigley Q. Quintus, who had been by far the most unpopular professor at all of Northwestern. This meant that Mr. Pryce was deluged with meetings, bothered by phone calls, and got to do hardly any teaching of Latin, Greek, or Etruscan magic at all. He was very distracted, and although Mr. Pryce was a good man, when he was distracted, he was often very dismissive. Mrs. Pryce was just the opposite. When she got harried and hateful, she paid attention to every detail and was pro-active, which often led to unnecessary petty evil. Still, Rachael felt herself much persecuted by Mrs. Pryce, and fled to her father's study, where he was attempting to understand the procedure for "new hires" and finding himself vexed, despite speaking fourteen languages and being certifiably brilliant.

"What has your mother done **now**?" Mr. Pryce greeted his daughter, who was sulking and twisted her hair around her fingers. "Has she told you to stand up straight again?"

"She threw a shoe at me for asking why it mattered who Chester A. Arthur was," said Rachael crossly. "Mom said that as far as she knew, it didn't matter if I knew my presidents, but to stop acting as though it was her fault that education is largely anecdotal and irrelevant. She'd rather be the madwoman in the attic and then asked me who that was a reference to."

"And did you know it was Bertha Rochester?" Mr. Pryce asked. Rachael's eyes lit up and she kissed her father on the cheek.

"Now I do!" she said, half-skipping back to the makeshift school. "Mom! Hey, Mom! It was Bertha Rochester, Mom! So there!"

"What book is she from, smart girl?" Mrs. Pryce asked tartly, promising another fight between mother and daughter over why Rachael had not yet read Jane Eyre. For those of you who have not read it either, Jane Eyre is by Charlotte Bronte, and concerns the adventures of a young orphan governess whose luck is nearly as bad as Rachael Pryce's, except that Jane is plainer, and nobody will attempt to light Rachael on fire on her wedding night, which is what Bertha Rochester did.

Mr. Pryce, sighing, closed the door behind him, because he was trying very hard to be a good head of the Classics Department, and it was very difficult with squabbling family in the other room. He was a very clever and handsome man who loved his family, his job, and tried to do his best, but he was afflicted with a problem that many Good Fathers have, which is melancholy. This meant that while he was perfectly happy to have an Evil Wife, a troublesome prophecy moppet as a daughter, and the Northwestern University Classics Department to reorganize, he felt that he was still a traitor for betraying his best friend, Angel.

Angel was a very famous souled vampire champion. He had also tried to kill Mr. Pryce for kidnapping his son Connor, which Mr. Pryce had done because of a prophecy that warned the father would kill the son, had threatened Mrs. Pryce weekly for years, even after his vampire sire and daughter, Darla and Drusilla, had abused Mrs. Pryce in a wine cellar because Angel had locked her in it with other evil lawyers. He also fired Mr. Pryce and his friends to sulk for two months, nearly killing all of them, and in the alternate fate Mr. Pryce had narrowly escaped, allowed Mr. Pryce's alternate universe true love to die, erased the memories of the world, and then sent Mr. Pryce on a suicide mission. Nonetheless, Mr. Pryce felt bad, which meant that he believe in principles over pragmatism, because pragmatically, Angel was a horrible friend who was very, very selfish, even though in principle, he was right.

So after an evening spent listening to a musical fight between Mrs. Pryce and Rachael, Mr. Pryce made a well-meaning decision. This means that while the decision was foolish and anyone could see it was so, it was meant out of the goodness of Mr. Pryce's heart. He called his old girl-friend, Miss Winifred Burkle, to have her relay a message that Mr. Pryce's daughter was a prophecy moppet, and that it might be a matter of interest for Angel and his other old friends. As we all know, this was a grave breach of the contract of Strict Neutrality. However, Mr. Pryce was frightened that by leaving Rachael with Mrs. Pryce all day (especially with the insult from Mrs. Van de Kamp to be avenged), and that she might be getting overexposed to Evil, and thus he needed advice in how to subtly balance that with Good.

His fears proved well-justified. Mrs. Pryce spent one too many evenings watching Mrs. Van de Kamp garden while she was trapped planning lessons instead of revenge and her garden, and at last snapped. Which meant, of course, she spent the rest of the evening muttering about being forced instead of her husband, the educator. Now, despite her status as Evil, Mrs. Pryce had a long, slow temper, which meant that she didn't snap quickly, but once she got truly angry, she was angrier than most people and did things that were extremely evil.

The next day, Mrs. Pryce made soup.

Homemade chicken noodle soup, to be precise, but with one of Mrs. Pryce's special herbs from her attic apartment, which had always been double-locked and forbidden to Rachael and Mr. Pryce as a base of operations. All sorts of unwholesome sounds and smells came from the attic on occasion, and Rachael had often dreamed of being invited in, to see the dark and damp underbelly of her mother's Evil actions. She would have been disappointed -- even the poisons looked more like chemicals, and it was done like a very nice office.

After all, Mrs. Pryce was a lawyer first and a chemist second.

The soup was very fragrant and delectable, which means that Rachael was more than happy to have it for lunch. It was intended to be quickly lethal, but after serving the first bowl with a sweet smile, Mrs. Pryce was struck with deepest regret, a new emotion, and it took her a moment to make sure it wasn't indigestion. Upon realizing it was regret, she tripped, knocked the bowl of soup into the air, and promptly tossed the rest. Unfortunately, part of the soup ended up in the fishbowl and the Pryce family goldfish, Winkums, was immediately killed.

Rachael started to scream, and by the time Mr. Pryce came home with an unexpected guest (the aforementioned Miss Burkle), there had been a six hour row between mother and daughter.

Things rapidly deteriorated from there, meaning that Miss Burkle and Mrs. Pryce had hated each other since Mrs. Pryce was Miss Morgan. Despite Mr. Pryce's best efforts and his distress, there was almost an altercation, and Mrs. Van de Kamp called three times to warn that she might have to dial the police, especially after Rachael's first tearful answer.

It ended with Rachael crying harder about her dead goldfish and Miss Burkle testing the remnants of the chicken noodle soup for poison while Mrs. Pryce sat on the couch, refusing to say a word with Miss Burkle in the vicinity. Miss Burkle attempted to get near Rachael only once, because there had been Words about "self-righteous judgmental twats" getting near Mrs. Pryce's daughter. But she had managed to give Rachael a card, which she palmed into her purse, before Mr. Pryce had left with Miss Burkle in a huff.

Mrs. Pryce had stormed upstairs to plot something horrible to do to Bree Van de Kamp in lieu of actual resolution. Rachael had found herself with the run of the house, and some serious pleasure that her mother had finally got hers. Even when Mr. Pryce came home from dropping Miss Burkle off, locked himself in his study, and didn't speak to Rachael, either, it seemed more amusing than not.

The next day, Mrs. Pryce did not demand Rachael come downstairs, and so instead of doing any lessons, she went shopping with her parents' money, bought legal MP3s, clothes and makeup her mother wouldn't have approved of for being cheap, like an old-school hoodie, and ate lunch at a fast food restaurant. When she got home, she had decided that her anger at her mother had been overdetermined, which in reality means that a system of linear equations has more equations than unknowns, but which she decided meant had been too fueled by the ability to score points off her parents by fighting.

The worst part was that her parents were still fighting when she entered the house, but not the loud but trivial way they often fought over Rachael's Prophecy Moppethood, or the best way to exterminate a Classics professor or Mrs. Van de Kamp, but the quiet, serious fighting that signified something more.

"Fred in my house? Telling **me** how to parent?" Mrs. Pryce asked. "Why don't you just serve me the papers and find a lawyer?"

"Lilah, honestly," said Mr. Pryce, and Rachael realized they were seriously discussing a divorce. "You're the one who chose to break our agreement and no court on earth is going to award custody to you."

It was no longer funny. Rachael had enjoyed watching her mother and father squirm, being her mother's daughter and prone to Evil on occasion, but a divorce! She had to find Miss Burkle immediately, so Rachael took the card from her purse, stole ten dollars from her father's wallet, the camera from her mother's coat, and made a quick journey to the hotel where Miss Burkle was staying. Upon hurrying up three flights of stairs, Rachael's day only got worse.

There, in the hotel room, was Miss Burkle kissing another woman! In an instant, Rachael realized the subterfuge that Miss Burkle had perpetrated on the Pryce family, which means that she was very angry that Miss Burkle had pretended to be in love with Mr. Pryce simply because she hated Mrs. Pryce and had been told to retrieve Mr. Pryce and Rachael by any means necessary.

Rachael was very upset. "He's not going to be happy with you," said the other woman, who had red hair and brown eyes and looked very nice. Rachael didn't really care, because anyone working with Miss Burkle was an enemy in her head, but she did like her very cute blue jeans with a big flower stitched on one leg.

"I don't care," said Miss Burkle. "Willow, she tried to **poison** that child. Poison her, just because she was annoyed about something!"

Willow (the other woman) made a comforting noise, but Rachael, who was busily snapping pictures, thought that perhaps this Willow didn't look as disturbed as Miss Burkle was. Rachael discovered she wasn't that disturbed any more, either. Mrs. Pryce hadn't even let her take a bite of the poisoned soup, and it was only because of the unfortunate dead goldfish that anyone had guessed Mrs. Pryce had done the thing.

"Teenagers are hard, Fred honey," Willow said. "And I can't even imagine how annoying a prophecy kid would be who's half like Wesley, let alone the way you describe Lilah."

Rachael stuck her tongue out and took another picture. She'd show them! Annoying, indeed.

"I have to go, sweetie," Miss Burkle said then to the redheaded woman, as Rachael took another two or three pictures. "Wes will understand. We just have to get him and the girl, if she isn't as evil as her mom, away from **her** bad influence."

A very irritated Rachael almost confronted Miss Burkle right then and there, but as I've said, she'd been trained by her Evil but pragmatic mother to never run up to someone and accuse them of anything, because it never worked. Instead, Rachael knew she had to get to her parents with the pictures of Miss Burkle and her lesbian lover and she didn't have much time. She had somehow forgotten that yesterday, the idea of showing Mrs. Pryce that it was very mean to hurt someone by leaving with Mr. Pryce had sounded like a good idea.

Sprinting from the train station the entire way, Rachael crashed through the splinters of the front door, surprised at how messy it was to explode a wooden door, and gasping, slightly cut, and a little smoky, pointed at Miss Burkle.

"You horrible homewrecker! You have a girlfriend!" she cried. "I have proof!"

Miss Burkle froze, and Mr. Pryce, surprised, moved away from his former flame. Meanwhile, Mrs. Pryce lifted an eyebrow but did not yet smile. "Are you sure, sweetie?" Mrs. Pryce asked sweetly, which meant she knew it was so, but was planning to twist the knife in Miss Burkle for this set of lies. "After all, it's a horrible thing to accuse people of things that aren't true simply based on their reputation."

"I saw her kissing a redheaded woman," Rachael gasped, still pointing wildly at the deceitfully well-meaning Miss Burkle. "I took pictures with your camera, which I did steal, and I'm not sorry I did. Because where would we be then?"

"I'm not sorry you did, either," Mrs. Pryce said, advancing on Miss Burkle. "So. I see you're as jealous and sneaky as ever. You don't love Wesley at all, do you?"

"No, I never did," said Miss Burkle, clasping her hands over her mouth with a horrified yelp. "Oh! You gave me a Truth Potion, didn't you?"

Mrs. Pryce shook her head. "Why would I do that?" she asked. "I already know the truth about you. You are an insecure wretched mouse of a woman who isn't honest with herself because of this idea that Good Girls Don't. I may be Evil, Fred, and yes, in fact, I am damn good at being bad. But I know that Wes is happier with me in his bed, and Rachael couldn't have a better mother, and that you are only here because Angel sent you to lure Wes away without appearing to breach the contract. Isn't that true?"

"No!" Miss Burkle said passionately. "I did it for myself, because I hate you. You took Wes away from us. Do you know how unbearable Angel is without Wes to take care of him? Charles is miserable, I'm miserable -- even Connor is miserable. And then here you two are, happy as clams, playing house? How **could** you, Wes? How could you fall for Lilah's evil?"

Mr. Pryce looked extremely discomfited. He was not a bad man, no matter what anyone said, and he did know that Angel required a special friend to take care of him, and Miss Burkle and Mr. Gunn were not up to the task. At the same time, being almost seduced by a woman with a girlfriend made him realize that he had hurt Mrs. Pryce and Rachael, and that it was not precisely his responsibility to make Angel responsible. Literally paralyzed with indecision, he stared at Mrs. Pryce and Miss Burkle blankly.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," Mrs. Pryce said. Rachael cheered; her mother was not going to fall for the false logical premises in Miss Burkle's arguments. "You're dating Willow Rosenberg, aren't you? There, you're happy. You are fighting the good fight and nobody's died recently, right? There, you're happy. If Angel makes you miserable, you've just found out you can tell him to go to Hell and live neutrally ever after. There, you're happy. What do you have to be sad about? Your daughter isn't a cursed prophecy moppet who spends all her time whining about being homeschooled, and your husband hasn't been seduced by a flat-chested bitch who's too busy navel-gazing to recognize her life is pretty damn good. Get out of my house, Fred, and leave me and my husband alone. Or else."

"Or else what?" Miss Burkle asked belligerently, which meant that while she was beaten, she was not going to be bullied by Mrs. Pryce.

"Or else you can find out what makes my garden grow," Mrs. Pryce said, murderous madness darkening her face. Mr. Pryce and Rachael's paralysis fell away at the sight of it, because while Mrs. Pryce was usually in charge of her Evil urges, she had a tendency to do foolish things while murderously angry.

"Fred," Mr. Pryce said while Rachael charged across the room and put her arm around her mother's waist, sticking out her tongue at the interloper. "I think it's for the best if you leave. I am grateful to you for coming when I asked, and for making me understand that my life is here now. I wish I could help you with Angel, but he's not my fight anymore. I'm more likely to do Good here with Lilah and Rachael than I am in Los Angeles. Love is a kind of good, you know, and is very potent at times when other things have no power."

This last comment was most definitely aimed at Mrs. Pryce and Rachael, and how although Mrs. Pryce had planned to kill Rachael, love had derailed her Evil plans. Mrs. Pryce squeezed her daughter, who squeezed back. They were both oddly proud of being part of their family, where you could plot murder and not mean it because of love, and suddenly felt very sorry for Miss Burkle. Miss Burkle's eyes were full of tears as she looked from Mr. Pryce to Mrs. Pryce.

"We miss you, Wes," Miss Burkle said simply. After all, she was not really a bad person, though her actions to try to lure Mr. Pryce home were very underhanded and unfair, and I cannot stress how hard it would be to discover your friend, fifteen years later, happily paired with the worst person you knew. She didn't understand, but she was not a cruel woman, our Miss Burkle. "We miss you a lot."

"Give my regards to everyone," Mr. Pryce said kindly, ushering her out of his home without seeming too eager to be rid of her. "Tell them that I miss them, too."

The door slammed. Mr. Pryce turned to Mrs. Pryce and chuckled. "I'd forgotten how earnest they all were," he said, holding out his arms. Mrs. Pryce smiled, went to him, and the two of them began an impromptu dance about the living room. "My Lord, I certainly dodged the bullet, didn't I?"

"Mmm-hmm," Mrs. Pryce purred smugly. "And now that your manful escape from my evil clutches is no more than a stupid idea in Fred's feverish brain, I think we should tell our darling prophecy moppet what we decided after the poisoning fiasco, before you damn well almost lost your mind."

Rachael perked up. "Are you sorry about being mean to me?" she asked. "Are you going to be a nicer teacher?"

"God, no," Mrs. Pryce said, still dancing with Mr. Pryce. "I don't have the patience for you, and poisoning you is hardly a good solution, is it?"

This posed a difficult dilemma for Rachael. "Well -- does this mean I'm not going to go to school anymore?" she asked. "I can't go back to New Trier, and you won't teach me, so I guess--"

"Oh, we've come to a different decision about how to resolve **that** little mess," Mr. Pryce said, smiling brightly at his wife. Mrs. Pryce chuckled, one of her eviler chuckles, and grinned.

"We're sending you to Catholic school," she said. "And then after school, your father will teach you how to protect yourself fairly, and I'll teach you how to do it unfairly."

Rachael was horrified. "Catholic school!" she said. "I'll be good! Don't make me go to Catholic school; that's where drop-outs and incorrigible cases go."

Mrs. Pryce, perhaps a little excited about having delivered the scorching verbal beating that had been nearly twenty years in the making, pointed and laughed at her daughter. I must admit this was a sign of Evil Motherhood, but I must also admit that Rachael's tragedy this time was mostly in her own mind, and she had earned her doom. Thus if you are also pointing and laughing, it might not be such a terrible thing. This time.

"That'll learn you," she said. "Next time I want to know which mediocre president was which, you'll remember, won't you?"

Poor Rachael was once again reduced to tears. And as she fled to her room to have another outburst of adolescence, our prophecy moppet had no idea that the danger to her did not lay in Catholic School itself, but from an arena even more terrible, frightening, and unsettled than nuns with rulers and the dregs of the public school system in plaid pleated skirts.

Forewarned is forearmed, dear reader, and I warn you that if the tears of a young girl ache your heart, and the continuing stubbornness of Mr. and Mrs. Pryce brings you more pain than joy, you might simply wish to discontinue reading right now.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five: The Bad Boyfriend**

Love, according to a favorite movie of mine that borrowed the line from a very famous poet who is now dead, is a many-splendored thing. Love lifts you up where we belong, which means that all you need is love. Though, among those of us with a more cynical temperament (by which of course I mean Mr. and Mrs. Pryce), those lines would bring a groan and the admonition, "please, don't start that nonsense again."

Ironically, despite their practical arrangements and constant squabbling, the Pryces were actually an argument in favor of the power of love. The trouble, of course, is that love is just fine when cynics and realists engage in it, but when added to teenagers, madmen, and romantics? Love turns into a blanket permission to disregard all the rules, and the Pryces had already learned that wasn't true, given the memorandum of doom they had received from their employers sixteen years previously. Even after all those years, they maintained serious guilt that their daughter would pay for them evading their fates with love. The only reason they could handle with series of unfortunate events is that they were very grown-up lovers, and they understood that true love is a twinkie defense.

A twinkie defense means, in common parlance, an absurdist defense that seeks to blame choices on external forces, like too much sugar, heavy metal, or true love. While it succeeded in the original case, this was in San Francisco during the hippiest of hippie years, and even then, it caused rioting.

But to return to our heroine, who was only sixteen and cursed with prophecy moppethood as well as her new status as a Catholic schoolgirl, Rachael Pryce had no idea that she was at all susceptible to the highs and lows of love, and thus had no defenses.

However, one need not feel **too** much sympathy for our much-abused moppet. Rachael realized that being a Catholic schoolgirl and half-Evil allowed her to do any number of questionable things, like borrowing cigarettes from her old friend from New Trier's drama club, and loitering in public places in a plaid skirts to be leered at by pervy old men. For any number of reasons, this made the burden of being sent to religious school by distinctly non-religious parents (whom she also suspected of borrowing the idea from an episode of  The Simpsons) much less burdensome.

But one glorious afternoon, Rachael and her friends found themselves hanging around a convenience store (I have been told this is a very daring thing for children of suburban parents to do during a school day) when she caught sight of a mysterious man hiding in the shadows. At first, she was content just to look, as the man was handsome in a seedy way, but after long minutes of looking, the man saw her looking back. Instead of dismissing her, the blond, pale man smiled and waved at her, indicating she should go speak to him.

This, of course, caused a slight crisis in the posse.

"Oh my God, do it!" cried Rachael's friend Gay Tony, so called to distinguish him from Tony Wilson, AKA Not-Gay Tony, because both wore too much black and did theater. "He's **so** hot. Don't you think, Mariah?"

"He's hot, but he's a total perv," answered Mariah, who was Rachael's other especial friend. "If you go and mess with him, your mom's going to find out and **so** kick your ass."

Rachael discovered she was now determined to walk over to the blond man, despite her many misgivings and premonitions that Mariah was right, and grin impishly before saying, "Hey. Can I borrow a cigarette?"

"Nasty habit, luv," said the blond man. Rachael discovered immediately that her mysterious gentlemen had a British accent (which was much less exotic than it would be to any other American girl), and that he had a great smile. "Hey, I know you. Rachael Pryce, innit?"

Having discovered that anyone who knew her was bad news, Rachael recoiled. "Who, may I ask, are you?" she inquired, wondering suddenly why the blond man stayed in the shadows. "Or what?"

"I'm a friend of the family," he said, flashing that smile again. Rachael's many logical reasons for walking away melted under its power. "Favor your mum, don't you?"

It appeared to Rachael that the vampire was one of her mother's Evil cronies, and edged back further. She also remember that she'd been warned not to talk to strangers who knew her, or the consequences would be dire -- military school at least, and possibly scrubbing bidets at a Bulgarian convent.

"I am SO not like my mom," Rachael replied, a little offended. "Anyway, I haven't decided who to favor. Not until I'm eighteen."

I am certain that Rachael would have withdrawn, but the mysterious gentlemen did the most enchanting thing he could do. He chuckled a low, deep chuckle, and took a long drag from his cigarette before offering it to her. Was there anything Rachael could do but accept?

"Undecided? Even with your mum trying to kill you on occasion?" he asked.

"I think if she **really** meant it, I would be dead," Rachael said, handing the cigarette back. "Don't you, Mister..."

"Spike," the less-mysterious gentleman said. "And I believe you about your mum."

"Good," she said, not sure what to do. "Thanks for being nice about my mother. Many people aren't, and it's lame to forever be defending an Evil Mother whom you are otherwise quite fond of, and who is otherwise quite fond of you."

Spike laughed again, and Rachael knew that she liked the look of him. "You said it, luv," he said. "Know who I am, then?"

"I'm afraid not," Rachael said. "My mom and dad's agreement includes that they don't tell me about their former cronies because that might sway me to Good or Evil unfairly. They're totally kinked on being fair, except when Mom cheats. But then Dad has a quiet word and things go back to Strict Neutrality."

Spike snorted. "Sounds peachy," he said, which means that he thought it sounded very dull, and suddenly Rachael realized she agreed with him. He was just so convincing, the way he held his cigarette and tilted his head, and Rachael's body was having all sorts of new feelings that felt good, in a rather scary way. "You ever want to blow off rules and contracts?"

"All the time," Rachael said, although this was untrue. Until today, she'd only wanted to blow off rules when it meant she didn't get what she wanted, and then only temporarily. "Hey, will I see you again? I have to go home soon to get my training, but I liked talking to you. We should do it again."

"Yeah, we should," Spike agreed, looking her up and down. "You're an odd kid, Miss Rachael."

"Consequences of being a prophecy moppet," Rachael said, blushing bright red. "Sometimes I sound like a heroine, and the rest of the time, I'm a punk kid who's trying to get a cigarette."

"Then I shall see you tomorrow," Spike said, pushing his hair back. "And we will talk about being punk kids together, as I suspect we've much in common."

Rachael, after waving, running back to her posse, and squealing incoherently, went home as though she were walking on air. In fact, it was the same concrete, dirt, paving stones, and grass as any other day. Love is a very powerful mental state, and when she greeted her mother, who was on the phone to a Chinese general to advise him regarding his negotiations with a lesser lord of Hell, Mrs. Pryce thought she looked a little distracted.

"Dad?" asked Rachael, knocking at her father's door. "I'm ready for training and stuff. But first, I have a question."

Mr. Pryce looked up from one of his dusty tomes of magic. Now, being a prophecy moppet and the daughter of a Classics professor, you might think manuscripts were second nature to Rachael. However, she seemed to be exceptionally sloppy around them, and after she had calamitously spilled tea on the only copy of an eighth century Byzantine MSS, her father had politely asked her not to touch them anymore. Thus, Rachael clasped her hands behind her back when walking in.

"Ask away," he said kindly.

"Why did you and Mom get married? Was it because you were in love with her and never never wanted anyone else to see her ever?" Rachael asked. Mr. Pryce looked at her in complete surprise. "I guess I'm asking what it felt like to be in love."

"I see," Mr. Pryce said, mouth dry with panic. "Marriage and love are two different things, moppet. You can be in love with lots of people and not get married. Marriage is a much more serious thing that often has a lot to do with other things. In our case, you."

Rachael frowned, not quite sure she understood what her father was trying to say about his marriage. As a point of fact, neither did Mr. Pryce. "So you and Mom are married..."

"Largely to keep a fair and balanced eye on you," said Mr. Pryce absently. "Why?"

Truthfully, this was what one calls a glossing-over for the sake of Mr. Pryce's illusions about his daughter's age. Except for her innate evil, Mr. Pryce was exceptionally fond of Mrs. Pryce's company. Were it not for the perennial danger that Prophecy Moppet was always in from Mrs. Pryce, Mr. Pryce would have long since become resigned to Mrs. Pryce's evil. She was not sloppy or vindictive, and many of the people she'd taken down in her path had been evil, obnoxious, or both.

"No reason," Rachael lied, feeling fluttery in her stomach. "So what's today's lesson, Dad?"

In this very simple manner, Rachael learned the truth of a very old proverb, "oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!" which was said by another dead poet of moderate fame and immortality. She was full of dreams of Spike, whom she went and visited every day, but felt she couldn't tell her father or mother that she was seeing a vampire. At the same time, she wanted to know if she was in love, and her questions were clearly upsetting her parents.

"Are you afraid that Dad and I are still in trouble?" asked Mrs. Pryce over a spa luncheon Rachael had earned with straight A's on her report card. "Trust me, we're fine."

"Oh, it's not that," said Rachael. "It's just that you two are so different and people clearly didn't approve and I don't know how you would tell people..."

"Well, we didn't," Mrs. Pryce said, sipping a Perrier. "Not for a long time. It's just smarter, because someone always has to tell you how wrong you are for each other...you do know you can tell me anything, right?"

But Rachael, like all young lovers with a secret, decided that telling the secret was a terrible idea. She had reason after reason why she should not tell her parents a thing, and found all sorts of little excuses why she had to be here or there, to spend time alone with Spike.

Spike taught her how to kiss, how to do a shot of tequila, and what punk rock was really all about. "Anarchy, love," he told her, blowing on her ear. "Bloody rules and prophecy, they're not worth bollocks compared to passion, love, and a purpose. You think your mum and dad ran away to follow rules? Bah. They were in love and they wanted."

"What do you think they wanted?" Rachael asked, thinking that it was very nice to have him to lean against, though it would be even nicer if he was warm. She shivered a little. "My parents tell me they want lots of things, and none of them make sense."

"Bugger your parents," Spike said, which meant he had no idea about the true motives of the Pryces and didn't want to admit it. "What do you want?"

"Another kiss?" she suggested, unaware of just how much she sounded like her mother. Spike, having not really met Mrs. Pryce, didn't either, but he suspected. He obliged, and it seemed that one kiss led to another, and three kisses led to hands under clothes, and so on and so forth.

Now, lest you think that the Pryces were puritanical about premarital sex, Rachael, as an accidental pregnancy, had of course gotten comprehensive sex education from as early an age as she could remember. "Wait until you're ready," Mrs. Pryce had advised. "And that's two years after you **think** you're ready."

It was sound advice, and even Rachael's friends had agreed it was sound advice, but there is a difference between agreeing entirely with your mother when you do not have a very attractive and seductive boyfriend kissing you ever night, and trying to sit yourself in said boyfriend's lap while he was still standing up.

"You're out late again," Mrs. Pryce said one evening, waiting at the door after an afternoon spent necking, which meant Rachael and Spike spent it in his car kissing, touching, and trying to get as naked as possible. "We need to talk. I understand you're still annoyed at us for sending you to Catholic school, but hiding from us and not calling? Keep it up, and you're going to be grounded."

"Does Dad ever get a say?" Rachael countered, because she knew the fastest way to divert the conversation was to turn it back on her parents. "Or are you going to micro-manage my life until I'm your evil assistant?"

"Don't play your mother off me," Mr. Pryce said from the kitchen, where he was attempting to make a recipe he'd gotten from a colleague. "You were out very late and I tried to call. We worry."

"And with good reason," Mrs. Pryce said, touching Rachael's neck. Spike had left a mark, and Rachael worried if it was a bite or a hickey. "Well, at least you were having fun and not smoking behind the convenience store like your friend Mariah. Mrs. Van de Kamp saw her on the way home when I asked if she had seen you. When do we get to meet him?"

"He's not...the meeting kind of boyfriend," said a very guilty prophecy moppet. This raised both parents' eyebrows, because they had seen the last few prophecy moppets in love, and Mr. Pryce in particular was thinking of souls, death, and weeks of tears and slammed doors.

"Well, then he's not the having kind of boyfriend, either," said he abruptly, coming out of the kitchen wearing an apron and stirring the béchamel sauce. "Sorry, dear."

Rachael found herself in a new and frightening situation, one where both parents were united in agreeing that to have a boyfriend, they had to meet him.

However, Rachael was nothing if not quick on her feet, so she tried to deflect. "If he meets you, he'll know that I'm a **destined** person. That'll just freak him out and it might be dangerous."

"Oh, please," Mrs. Pryce said, shooing both Mr. Pryce and Rachael into the kitchen. "You told Sister Mary Agnes that you couldn't do your history homework because you were busy with the business of prophecy fulfillment. I'm sure you've told your boyfriend...what's his name?...all about your specialness."

"And don't you dare tell us you hate us and stomp to your room," Mr. Pryce added. "We're going to have a nice family dinner and you can tell us when your new boyfriend is going to meet us afterward."

Sometimes, Rachael found, being a teenage prophecy moppet with smart parents was much more traumatizing than it deserved to be. This was one of those times. She ended the evening by agreeing that she would bring "James" (it being the only name she could think of for Spike off the top of her head) around the house Friday night, and then fled to her room, tears stinging in her eyes. Only there could she dare cry at the cruelty of her parents, who were eternally unfair to her all the time.

I wish that I could tell you that things got better from that moment, that Spike agreed to meet the Pryces, and the Pryces were so touched by his devotion to Rachael that they approved of the match. It would be even better if I could tell you that on Rachael's eighteenth birthday, they were married in an _au courant_ evening ceremony in the Pryce backyard, with dozens of her mother's prize roses adorning everything as a beloved father gave Rachael away to her loving man. In Rachael's mind, it was the inevitable future, once her parents saw reason. She even believed that her destiny, once so fraught, was simple.

"I'm destined to be with Spike," she scribbled in her journal. "How else could he find me so easily and how else could we fall in love so quickly?"

So, tears dried and spirits raised, Rachael went to school, did her work, and headed for her favorite spot, only to be confronted with an exceptionally tragic sight.

There, in the car that had been her getaway to paradise, was Spike...and another woman. A small, lithe, blonde woman who Rachael couldn't see clearly, thanks to all the tears. Gasping in horror, Rachael fell on her school bag and twisted her ankle. This caused a louder shriek of pain, and Spike peered over the window.

"You bastard!" Rachael said, getting to her feet and trying not to wince. Even her retreat was miserably undignified; ankle aching every inch of the way, she hop-hobbled back to her house, pounding on the front door with tears blinding her.

Mrs. Pryce opened the door, looking distinctly mussed. Another horrific thing; clearly the Pryces had assumed that Rachael was busy for the entire afternoon and chose to busy themselves. She hastily buttoned her blouse and wiped the smeared lipstick off her cheek.

"What happened, honey?" she asked, ushering the brokenhearted girl into the house. "Your ankle's swollen. Did you fall? Why didn't you call us?"

"Oh, Mom! I found my new boyfriend...with another girl!" Rachael wailed, eyes brimming with tears, as Mr. and Mrs. Pryce regretfully gazed at each other and their overturned glasses of wine, their promised evening of sex and dancing clearly ruined, and then stood up to comfort their distraught daughter.

"Would you like me to kill him?" Mrs. Pryce asked sweetly, petting Rachael's curling black hair while Mr. Pryce gave her a gentle hug and put her on the couch so they could inspect her ankle.

"That's just it -- you can't kill him," Rachael said, ignoring the fact that Mrs. Pryce had offered to do more evil and Mr. Pryce had not even shaken his head in disapproval. "He's a vampire and that's why I didn't want you to know about him."

Mr. Pryce's eyes widened and Mrs. Pryce looked grim. "What?" he asked. "Does he have a name?"

"Spike," Rachael said miserably, nose red from sniffling all the way home. "He's a bastard and I hate him for being so cute. Evil vampire....bastard."

"Spike?" Mrs. Pryce said, her voice rising. "Wesley! What is **Spike** doing in our town? Did you know?"

"Lilah," and Mr. Pryce sounded just as displeased as Mrs. Pryce, "I swear to you on our contract I did not know. Rachael, what have we told you about having vampire boyfriends?"

Rachael wiped the tears from her eyes. I have mentioned before that she suffered from having a Good Father and an Evil Mother, and that on occasion, she lapsed into Evil. At that point, Rachael was more interested in the parental histrionics, meaning the loud fight that her parents were trying to have without her realizing, than in Spike's infidelity. These were always opportunities to wrangle privileges, knowledge, and other untoward things from these confrontations, and being her mother's daughter, Rachael pressed the issue.

"That they only led to tears and fights, but Dad," and Rachael paused to force a few more tears from her blue-grey eyes. "How was I to know there were **really** vampires? No one at New Trier..."

"You see?" Mr. Pryce said to his wife. "What have I told you?"

"If she sees vamps, I want demons in the mix," Mrs. Pryce said inexorably, still rubbing Rachael's back comfortingly. "Balance, Wesley. You know the rules."

"But it's a moot point, Lilah," Mr. Pryce argued. "She has seen a souled vampire, which is a very balanced creature. The evil of a vampire, but with the good of a soul."

Mrs. Pryce snorted and tossed her head. She apparently conceded the point, but glossed over this by turning her attention back to her daughter.

"How far did he get?" she asked Rachael, who blushed. Mrs. Pryce assumed a little further than Rachael meant, because despite loving Spike, she knew better than to get entirely naked with a vampire. "I **see.** Damn Spike. The last time he shagged a Prophecy Moppet, you would not **believe** the complications..."

All over again, the hurt welled up in Rachael, who had earnestly believed that she was the first special girl to win the heart of her handsome souled vampire. To hear that she was not, and her mother's slight vulgarity to boot, made her feel inches tall and tore her heart into itty-bitty shreds.

"Spike's shagged other prophecy moppets?" she asked, shocked to the core.

"And how!" Mrs. Pryce said, patting Rachael on the shoulder. Rachael burst into noisy tears, sobbing against her mother's chest. "Do you want me to kill him, sweetheart?"

"Unfair to the contract!" Mr. Pryce said loudly.

"Give me a break," Mrs. Pryce retorted, which is to say she answered with some tartness. "You know that you want to kill him as much as I do, and if Prophecy Moppet says the word, he's dust in the wind."

Mr. Pryce, to Rachael's very great surprise, nodded thoughtfully. "Useless git. Breaking all the rules just to get a glimpse," he agreed. "Rachael, darling? Would you like your mother to kill him?"

Rachael sniffled. "Do you really think he only did it because I'm a prophecy moppet?" she asked, glowering at her ankle while her mother got up for an ice pack. "That's really awful."

The doorbell rang, and as Mr. Pryce went to get it, Mrs. Pryce returned with an ice pack and towel.

"Can I come in?" Spike asked, holding a bunch of flowers.

"No, you really can't," Mrs. Pryce said, glaring angrily. "You're lucky I don't come over there and give you a taste of angry Evil Mommy."

"Lilah," Mr. Pryce said placatingly. "That's hardly necessary because--" and Mr. Pryce, quick as lightning, punched Spike between the eyes and sent him reeling. "Angry Good Daddy is just as angry as you are, and he won't miss and get the goldfish."

Rachael squeaked with laughter and chanced a glance at her mother, who was red-faced with what appeared to be rage, but turned out to be suppressed laughter. Mrs. Pryce was trembling with laughter as Spike made loud wails about his poor broken nose. It was suddenly all very absurd, which means that love's spell had been broken for Rachael.

All of the sudden, her sensitive poet vampire boyfriend was the bleached blond howling about how Wes didn't play fair, come outside and he'd show him something fierce. And her mother, laughing about getting the goldfish! Poor Winkums, it shouldn't have been funny, but Rachael had a bit of a sense of humor, and it surfaced at that moment in force.

"Honestly, you want him dust, I'll do it," Mrs. Pryce said, gazing at Spike as he regrouped, made to punch Mr. Pryce in the nose, and was paused by the barrier of non-invitation. "One thrust and then poof! Something for me to brush up tomorrow. And then scatter on Bree's lawn. I'll do it just for that."

Spike ignored the taunting, even as Rachael giggled harder and more hysterically. "Bloody hell, Percy, it wasn't what the Moppet thought...you know how I am about Buffy," he was protesting. Mr. Pryce resolutely ignored him.

"And you know how I am about my daughter," he replied unflinchingly.

"So...cake or death, kiddo?" Mrs. Pryce asked Rachael, shooting Spike a most venomous look, one she had learned in her earlier days as an evil lawyer.

"No, that's okay," said Rachael, feeling a bit of schadenfreude, which means that she was enjoying just how upset Spike was over her parents' comical dismissal of him and his ardent feelings for her. "Just have Dad get rid of him and then I want lots of chocolate and maybe an Ace bandage."

"Good girl," Mr. Pryce said, slamming the door in Spike's face and locking the door. "Are you certain you're all right?"

"No, I think I'm very upset," said Rachael. "But it won't make him a better boyfriend, will it?"

"Probably not," Mr. Pryce said, sitting down on the couch. "But it taught that arrogant booby a lesson he won't soon forget. And what did you learn?"

"Vampire boyfriends are bad, even when they're so good," she replied promptly, pleased that her parents were being so cheery toward her even though her broken heart and sprained ankle throbbed together in a disturbing rhythm.

"That's right," Mrs. Pryce said, kissing Rachael on the forehead. "It'll be okay."

I am afraid Mrs. Pryce willfully lied to Rachael, as one never quite gets over their first love, especially not when his momentary thoughtlessness leads to as many tears as Spike's did to Rachael. However, Rachael was willing to be comforted, and though tear stains spotted both diary and pillow for a few nights, she felt that as first loves went, one who taught her the pleasures of tequila and oral sex was quite worth the momentary embarrassment of the car scene.

And oh, when Mr. Pryce had walloped him! Rachael never thought of it without a thrill, for all her many years as a prophecy moppet. Love is a thing to be reckoned with, but beware when it makes one ridiculous, I suppose the lesson is. Or perhaps vampire boyfriends only lead to tears and remonstrations.

Unfortunately, I am not a wise old poet, a romantic, or a madman, thus I'm not sure.

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six: Frost's Fine Academy**

A moderately sympathetic person (by whom I mean, of course, someone who has not decided Miss Pryce brings much of her calamitous catastrophes on herself) might ask at this point in this never-ending narrative, "is anything **good** going to happen to this kid?" Fortunately for those readers, the months following Spike's summary dismissal from the Pryce home were, if not complete domestic felicity, at least something bordering upon it. Destined, after all, does not equal cursed, even if those moments when Destiny is paramount in an individual's life, the harrowing stress is often very distorting to his or her outlook.

In simpler language: destiny days suck, but they suck much less when you're not in the middle of one of them.

So once Rachael had suffered a month where the greatest excitement was Mrs. Pryce and Mrs. Van de Kamp being photographed along with their gardens for a Better Homes and Gardens cover and feature article? Even when the photographer chuckled unawares when Mrs. Pryce informed him that her secret was a steady diet of bodily evidence (as Mrs. Van de Kamp listened and filed it away for another battle), Rachael, like most prophecy moppets, began to yearn after destiny again.

Thus, I suppose it was unsurprising that one ploddingly calm Thursday afternoon, Rachael cut French class on the grounds that she already spoke perfect French, and found herself wandering Evanston, pretending to be a Northwestern University student. Being the child of a NWU professor, she did a better job than most of the actual students, and knew the Unicorn Cafe was the right place to study...or look like it.

And that was how Rachael came upon a business card for "Frost's Fine Academy" which had been left on the table where she sat with an enormous cappuccino with an almond-flavored biscotti. Quite accidentally, she picked up the dignified ivory card and ran her finger over the embossed print, thinking of how bored she was in Catholic school, and how she might indeed qualify as "a unique student" which was what the school claimed to cater to.

No reader should be surprised to discover that Rachael quite unadvisedly, meaning she didn't consult her parents or any authority because she was certain she knew better about her own life, called the number for Frost's Fine Academy. Within twenty minutes, she had an admissions interview scheduled and a full scholarship if she qualified. Rachael, you see, had given in to her half-Evil side and claimed that she had been orphaned by cruel fate and her unusual nature. She found, to her delight, that Miss Frost, the headmistress of Frost's Fine Academy, was extremely sympathetic.

Feeling quite pleased with herself, which meant that Rachael felt that she had finally taken control of her fate for the first time since her mother had taken a flamethrower to New Trier High School; she ambled home, where her parents were discussing the ethics of a Fountain of Youth potion in their own inimitable fashion. Which meant that they were practicing with swords while making their points.

"Your school called," Mr. Pryce said, parrying one of Mrs. Pryce's barrages. "Why did you miss French?"

" _Car_ _j'y encore parle le français!_ " Rachael snapped, evading the feint-parry-disengage-lunge Mrs. Pryce neatly dealt her husband during his distraction, and flopping on the couch.

" _Eh-la!_ " Mrs. Pryce said, clearly not interested in her daughter's excuses. "The potion only works once, you understand. Thus, it's a single so-called do-over, and those who would use it have regrets."

"The potential for...off-target!...abuse is chilling," Mr. Pryce countered, ducking and landing his riposte. "Imagine if Nixon had had access to that potion."

"Nixon's employers -- that's not off-target! -- wouldn't have given him access to it," Mrs. Pryce replied after a noisy barrage of parries, disengages, and a final attempt at a flick by Mr. Pryce which landed, as she said, off target. "Are you going to make the robot argument again?"

Rachael groaned. It was always Nixon for her parents, and that just led to bad jokes about robots. But their state of relative distraction did give Rachael a naughty, naughty idea.

"I have an interview at an exclusive boarding school tomorrow, so I'm skipping school," Rachael interrupted, though not in a very loud voice. In fact, as she expected, it was drowned out by a counter 6, parry 7, and a flick. They were clearly playing foil and not epee today. "Is that okay? If you don't say anything, I'm assuming it's okay."

"The robot argument, as you so eloquently state it, is a perfectly legitimate one," Mr. Pryce said, pulling off his mask, winded and sweaty. "Rachael? Are you hungry?"

"Not especially," Rachael replied, smiling.

And so it was that the next day, Rachael snuck out of school during PE, unconsciously mimicking a very famous video that included the actress who played Arwen Evenstar to a great deal of controversy from fans of the Lord of the Rings books. She had arranged with a friend with a car to be driven to her interview, which was in downtown Chicago, thus also imitating a scenario very close to the famous movie with Matthew Broderick singing "Danke Schon."

Miss Frost, headmistress and founder of Frost's Fine Academy, met Rachael at an expensive restaurant. The first thing that came to Rachael's mind was that Miss Frost was very blonde. Britney blonde. Maybe even Paris blonde.

The second thing was that this interview was perhaps a mistake, because there were three other students at the table, and they were all mutants. Rachael had not been entirely aware that mutants were real, though after having a vampire boyfriend, she had to admit she should have considered the possibility.

"You're Rachael Pryce," Miss Frost said, smiling at her. "Emma Frost, headmistress of Frost's Fine Academy. Have we met before, my dear?"

"No, ma'am," Rachael said, sitting down next to a very skinny boy with a prominent Adam's apple, who looked as uncomfortable as she did, possibly because his eyes looked like liquid mercury and he was unused to being out so prominently in public. "I like your coat."

Miss Frost had a white coat, because she wore all white, and while many blondes could not quite pull off said look, Miss Frost looked utterly stunning. Rachael looked around the table, swallowed hard, and feigned her father's best smile, thinking that Miss Frost might have her mother beat for sneers and leers.

*Ah, of course, your mother," Miss Frost said, with the tones of someone remembering. "How is dear Lilah?"

Rachael looked around, but no one had spoken, which meant that perhaps Miss Frost had spoken some other way, such as telepathy.

"Is everyone else here a student at the school?" Rachael asked.

"I'm afraid not," Miss Frost replied. "I'm only accepting one student for my school in Massachusetts, and now that I see the candidates, I suspect that my choice is obvious to everyone."

It was equally obvious to every student at the table that Miss Frost's choice was the absolute opposite of obvious. With the exception of all four knowing that her candidate could not be Rachael, who was clearly not a mutant. Or perhaps that wasn't obvious either; Miss Frost looked like a relatively normal woman, which meant that while she was overdressed and had a surprisingly tony British accent for a native of Boston, she was not visibly mutated.

The meal, while expensive, was not memorable for Rachael, for every time she looked at Miss Frost, minutes seemed to disappear, and when the after-lunch coffee was finished, the bewildered girl glanced around to discover she was the only student still sitting at the table.

"I've been **so** rude," Rachael stammered. "I think I should probably call my guardian now."

"There's no need to lie, Rachael," Miss Frost said. "You're aware I'm a telepath, and I knew both your parents in days past. They'll both be overjoyed to know you've been accepted to my school. After all, you're nothing more than a distraction to their more interesting pursuits."

Rachael's lip trembled, thinking of how easily Mrs. Pryce had sent her away to school rather than teach her at home. It seemed inconsequential that Rachael had hated home-school as much as her mother. And Mr. Pryce! Always busily teaching at Northwestern, arguing about robots! How could either of them be considered good parents?

"I think you're right," Rachael said forlornly, unaware that her conflict with her parents was her most easily pushed button. Miss Frost, with her telepathic abilities, had easily divined that Rachael often believed her parents often lost her in the folds of their contract of Strict Neutrality, and had a level of resentment and pain related to it that was really quite touching and pathetic. "When do we leave?"

"Oh, you're not accepted yet, Miss Rachael," Miss Frost said. "First, one last test before we go."

Whereupon Rachael found herself whisked outside and placed in Miss Frost's pure white chauffeured limousine, which was clearly a case of conspicuous consumption, as Miss Frost sipped at straw-colored champagne and ruffled Rachael's hair.

"You have the coloring and the potential to be very great, you know," Miss Frost said. "Have your parents violated their silly contract yet and told you anything of their sordid pasts?"

"No, ma'am," Rachael said. "My mom outlined a few things, but nothing...really good."

"Do call me Emma," Miss Frost said, clucking maternally. "And I must say, I'm impressed at your mother's fortitude. If I'd been as amazing as Lilah Morgan in my heyday...well, I really was, wasn't I...but I couldn't have hidden my accomplishments to be the feature of a Better Homes and Gardens article."

Rachael wasn't quite sure what to say. She rarely considered that there had been a life before Strict Neutrality and prophecy moppet raising for her parents. Mr. Pryce was so naturally a professor and Mrs. Pryce was such a talented gardener and social meddler that it seemed alien to Rachael, discussing other things they had once been.

"My mom's a very good gardener," Rachael said weakly.

"I'm sure she's impeccable, dear," said Miss Frost. "But she was once much more interesting."

As Rachael quickly discovered, the more interesting one was in Miss Frost's eyes, the fewer clothes she wore. And Rachael was not quite sure that she was entirely comfortable, garbed in a deep red vinyl corset, a pair of skimpy lace-trimmed red panties, and red silk stockings attached by a garter belt. Indeed, she was fairly certain that no legitimate school would require such a uniform, but Miss Frost was absolutely insistent and Rachael was the student, after all. Besides, it was nice to be fussed over, told about an institution known as the Hellfire Club, and have one's hair curled, after all...

"You'll be a wonderful Red Queen," Miss Frost said at last, gazing at Rachael with very little sexual interest. "So very much like your mother, though without that indefinably potent aura of malice. Still...there are ways to teach you that as well, and I'm sure Lilah won't mind after a decade or two."

Rachael knew by then that her latest attempt to control her own destiny had ended, and in a greater disaster than usual. Kidnapped by a telepathic, telekinetic mutant who seemed to have some sort of connection to Mrs. Pryce...at the very least, Mr. Pryce would be furious, which meant that Mr. and Mrs. Pryce would punish Rachael in new and terrible ways if she ever escaped Miss Frost's velvety clutches.

"What are you going to do to me?" Rachael asked, shivering in her skimpy red costume. "I don't want to be part of the Hellfire Club! Anyway, I thought you'd given that up to become a teacher anyway..."

Miss Frost smirked. "Never believe the comic books, my dear Miss Pryce," she said grandly. "They always whitewash the important matters. Now, where were we?"

"Wasting your time on a very neutral alternative to the real thing, Emma?" asked a familiar voice. Rachael whimpered with relief. Her parents. At least, her mother.

"Lilah," Miss Emma Frost said grandly, closing the door behind Rachael's mother, whose legs were neatly displayed in sheer stockings with a seam up the back. "You look absolutely ravishing, given your appalling situation. How do you stand this backwater? I saw your roses in that ridiculous rag and thought to myself, Emma, there is a woman who needs some excitement in her existence."

"Kidnapping my daughter, who is by legal contract with my handsome, virile, and temperamental husband, being raised strictly neutral is not **quite** the way to my heart, you know," Mrs. Pryce replied airily.

"Who needs your heart, darling?" Miss Frost asked. "I wasn't aware you had one, in any case."

Mrs. Pryce sighed dramatically, and Miss Frost took that for some form of acceptance, because she quickly crossed the space between herself and Rachael's mother and gave her a very serious kiss.

The traumatic event was that Rachael's mother kissed back. It was surprising enough that Rachael whimpered and fled into the bathroom. How could she?

"As delightful as ever," Miss Frost said. "Your daughter is lovely, but very young and positively irritating at times."

"It's the prophecy moppethood," Mrs. Pryce replied, sitting down next to Miss Frost on the bed with a very sexual leer. "She seems to think she's very important. Though that leads me to an important question."

Miss Frost pouted. "What could be more important than two old friends meeting up after nearly twenty years apart?" she asked.

"Emma," Mrs. Pryce said dryly. "I hate to ruin our reunion...it really has been too long...but why is my teenage daughter in your luxuriously appointed hotel room dressed like a two-dollar hooker?"

This, I'm afraid to say, embarrassed but did not surprise Rachael, who thought that her mother was being unfair. She looked like at least a twenty-dollar hooker, by her own estimation. But to her surprise, Miss Frost simply lifted her glass of champagne in an ironic toast.

"I'm simply too fond of your luscious physical type?" Miss Frost countered archly. "It provides such a contrast to my own, don't you think? And she would be very becoming in black leather."

Mrs. Pryce gave Miss Frost a disapproving glare. "I appreciate that you called me, Emma, but unless you'd prefer I involve outside forces and embarrass both of us, you shouldn't leer so publicly after **my daughter.** "

Rachael's head peeked from behind the bathroom door, still reeling from the extremely sexual kiss that her mother had given another woman with little or no regard for Rachael's sensibilities.

"Was Miss Frost trying to seduce me, then?" she asked nervously. "Because I thought I was going to have to lie my way through mutant school knowing that my mother had once had an affair with my headmistress."

"Well, now you'll have to live your way through Catholic school, knowing your mother once had an affair with your not-quite-headmistress," Mrs. Pryce said crisply, most likely to cover her competing emotions of embarrassment and amusement. "We're leaving, Rachael."

"Does Dad know?" Rachael asked, watching Miss Frost wave them off with an amused expression on her patrician blonde face but no words.

"Dad knows," Mrs. Pryce said shortly. "It was one of my favorite stories for quite a long...what were you thinking? What have we told you? Don't go looking for trouble, you silly moppet!"

Rachael blushed, aware that she was still wearing bright red lingerie and it was very cold outside. She hoped her mother had a coat in the car. "Were you in the Hellfire Club?" she asked, looking at her mother speculatively, which means that for the first time, Rachael realized that Mrs. Pryce's history was a matter of great mystery to her, and upon realizing that, realized she knew very little of her father's life before Winnetka as well.

"No.  **God** no," Mrs. Pryce said, dragging Rachael along the carpeted hallways. "I was Wolfram and Hart, but you don't tell your father I told you or we'll be in a lot of trouble."

"A law firm?" Rachael asked, rather disappointed that her mother had not been Red Queen of the Hellfire Club. "You were a lawyer? I always thought you were kind of like, a powerful sorceress. What with the potion-making and gardening and all."

Mrs. Pryce began to laugh, as she was keenly aware of the absurdity of the situation she and her daughter found themselves in. "Habits of my old age. Really, I was a very good lawyer," she said. "Though actually, I was more the evil overlord type. And before you ask another question, I'll tell you when you're older."

"Fine," Rachael said sulkily. "I still hate school. And you."

"But at least now you're not going to the boarding school with corsets," Mrs. Pryce pointed out practically. "So what do we say?"

Rachael frowned. "Thank you, Mom," she said, certain that no girl cursed with a destiny had ever suffered the number of humiliations that she had in the history of the world.

I suspect one Miss Buffy Summers would disagree, but that is, of course, a subjective matter.

 


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven: Camp Cherryland**

From a very young and tender age, Rachael Pryce had been subjected to an obscure form of torture for the sake of her parents' marital sanctity, which means that they sent her to summer camp so they could indulge in their natural tendencies unhindered for two months. This particular summer, Rachael had hoped that Camp Cherryland, the bucolic Minnesota camp she was always sent to, would be unwilling to have a suspected felon as a counselor-in-training.

However, her nascent hopes were stillborn when Mrs. Pryce put in a call to Camp Cherryland's executive director, Ms. Mary Cherry, and demanded to speak to her mother. Mrs. Cherry Cherry (the former wife of TV legend Erik Estrada) had been an associate of Mrs. Pryce's back in the lawyering days, and Mary Cherry herself had been prone to arson during her teens.

"Girls will be girls!" Cherry Cherry had said with her typical gusto, and it was decided. Rachael was to be sent to Camp Cherryland of Cherryland, Minnesota, as a counselor-in-training. However, all of the matches at Camp Cherryland were to be locked up in case Rachael had an urge to commit arson in the dead of night, and the keys placed in the cabin of the small and weaselly camp acting director, Andrew Wells.

(As you are all familiar with Andrew Wells due to his previous association with Miss Buffy Summers, I needn't explain further why the Cherrys and the Pryces were certain that Rachael was in no danger of retrieving those matches.)

Since Rachael herself was no more prone to arson than Mr. Pryce was prone to interest in blondes, it was with a statistically low probability of conflagration that Rachael was packed into two suitcases and driven up to Camp Cherryland, to be greeted by the aforementioned Andrew Wells.

"Be good," Mr. Pryce said, kissing his daughter on the forehead as he set her suitcases in the dust next to her putative cabin.

"Be smart," Mrs. Pryce added, giving her daughter a hug and slipping a hundred dollar bill in her pocket.

With that, the Pryces got back in their modest and gas-efficient green compact, because both Pryces believed in fuel economy and low emissions, and promptly betook themselves to the nearest roadside motel. They then began indulging in one of their favorite child-free pastimes, which involved handcuffs, nudity, a well-worn leather coat, and the unmitigated evil of jumping on the bed.

Meanwhile, Rachael was unpacking her suitcases at Camp Cherryland to Director Cherry's favorite mix of the 80s and 90s, and was considering homicide by poison. But this reminded Rachael once again of Winkums, the poor martyred goldfish, and in the thinking, she stubbed her toe against the sharp metal of her bunk and started to cry in pain.

"Why are **you** crying?" asked one of the counselors, named Tara Jenny Harris, looking very smugly at her best friend, named Joyce Summers-Chase. "Nothing flammable?"

Joyce and Tara were the unfortunate result of one too many Alabama slammers and a hot summer night on the outskirts of Cleveland, Ohio. Rachael was unaware that their parents had known her parents, but had she known, it would have simply added to her contempt, as well as her parents'.

"Bitches, please," said Rachael, imitating her mother's dry tones. "We're in nature and my mother's botanically inclined. I think that means if I want you dead, I just have to walk outside and...good afternoon, Miss Cherry!"

Miss Cherry frowned and put her hands on her hips. "What, y'all have no sugar for your Auntie Mary Cherry?" she asked. Joyce and Tara flew to the camp director and hugged her. Rachael merely smiled, because while she was not planning to explain her plans in detail to Mary Cherry, she knew that Mary Cherry did not disapprove of murder, having found out as much from her father and mother's argument on the way up.

"We love you, Mary Cherry," Joyce and Tara said in unison, simpering poisonously at Rachael.

"I'm going to go to the bathroom, Mary Cherry," Rachael said.

"Don't light anything on fire!" Mary Cherry called after her.

I am afraid that I must report that upon leaving the earshot of Mary Cherry and the poisonous camp counselors-in-training, Rachael let loose a string of curses to bring a blush to the face of the most hardened sailor. Unfortunately for her, while Mary Cherry was not in earshot, someone else was.

"Jeez," said the man sitting atop a wooden picnic table, looking at Rachael with pity. "So you're Sparky Pryce, huh?"

"That's me," Rachael said sullenly, flopping onto the bench. "Who are you? You look a little old to be wearing the Camp Cherryland t-shirt of bright pink shame."

The man gave her a sour look. "I'm Connor," he said. "Counselor in charge of woodland survival. I lost my job at Chick-Fil-A, and my dad made me come work here to get some direction."

Rachael snorted. "Wow, your dad sounds like an asshole," she said. "My dad's an asshole, but mostly that's because he and my bitch mom ditched me to go have sex for two months without interruption. So now I'm Sparky Pryce, sharing a cabin with two bubbleheaded twits and getting bug bites, all for his naked pleasure."

Connor nodded. "On the asshole scale, that's kind of a medium," he said. "My dad tried to erase my brain one time, but then a mysterious benefactor bitchslapped him across the state and he didn't."

"Go mysterious benefactor," Rachael said, unaware that her mother had in fact been the benefactor. "So. You teach a bunch of spoiled brats how to tie knots, and I..."

"Aren't you tipped to be Andrew's assistant in this year's musical extravaganza?" Connor asked, looking at her in surprise. "It's on the staff sheets."

Rachael whimpered in abject horror. Andrew was well-known for his love of musicals, bad 1990s media, and running his assistant ragged. One had actually tried to kill him with a pair of knitting needles during his production of _Silmarillion Live!_ the year Rachael was nine.

Of course, the kickline had almost done that too, although it had been entirely by accident. By which I mean that the kickline, made up entirely of novice dancers between the ages of ten and twelve, had done a spectacular high kick in unison, sending twenty extra-pointy tap shoes flying toward Andrew's head as he conducted proceedings.

"Need a cigarette, Sparky?" Connor offered quickly, having realized that he had traumatized young Miss Pryce with further dooms she was doomed to face.

"No cigarettes for Rachael!" Mary Cherry bellowed, huffing and puffing through the trees. "Come on, you're clearly done with the bathroom now and Andrew is frantic for a latte."

"I wish I were dead," Rachael mourned, dragged away to the waiting Andrew.

She soon wished for death with a more-than-lazy desire; Andrew proudly announced to his new protege that this year's entertainment was going to be his own composition, _Friends: The Musical!_

Rachael managed to make it to her cabin before bursting into tears again, this time from emotional distress; unfortunately, Joyce and Tara, who had been assigned to relatively cushy assignments teaching tween girls to braid their hair and ride ponies, caught her doing so.

After that, 'Sparky' Pryce inevitably became 'Soggy' Pryce, and even the youngest camper learned to refer to Rachael as Soggy Wetbottom.

Most of the campers thus became interchangeable to Rachael, which meant that once she dealt with one overprivileged brat pointing and snickering at "Soggy Wetbottom" as she went to fetch Andrew some trinket while in her bright pink counselor polo shirt, she had dealt with all of them. There was one exception, an eight-year-old who had had the unmitigated daring to audition (and win) the role of Chandler Bing, much to the dismay of the fourteen-year-old playing Monica, who was clearly quite fond of Rachael.

"I'm William," he said, shaking her hand after winning the cherry role. "You're a very pretty girl. I think I'll marry you when you grow up."

Rachael giggled. "But I'm a lot older than you," she pointed out, thinking that might stump the young Lothario, but indeed it was Rachael who was stumped.

"Age ain't nothing but a number," he said, smiling fondly at her in a way that was disturbingly familiar. "And you're an outcast just like me. All the kids make fun of me because I'm a foster kid."

"A foster kid?" Rachael asked, but before she could get any more information, Connor beckoned and Rachael, with the foolishness that could only belong to a young girl who has found a kindred spirit, ran off to join him. "Hey, you. Lose the little bastards in the woods?"

"Don't joke about that," Connor said seriously. "My surrogate father did that to me once. It was terrible."

"Sorry," Rachael said with a dazzling smile. "Let's go to the dock. All the kids are afraid of water, because Mary Cherry told them snakes live down there waiting to suck little kids under and hold them for ransom."

Connor grimaced, which went very well with his longish light brown locks and intense blue eyes. Rachael approved when Connor looked conflicted, angsty, or otherwise romantic, being cursed with bad taste in men.

"Mary Cherry's completely insane," he said. "She probably shouldn't be watching children for a living. And I say this as an expert on people who should not be raising children."

"And you've never seen her with an ax," Rachael said, referring to a notorious incident in which Mary Cherry had almost become an ax murderer, screaming and swinging at her seventh stepfather, music icon Casey Kasem. It had only been a cry from a camper, "But Mary Cherry! You can't kill SCOOBY-DOO!" that saved his life. While this incident had occurred before Rachael's tenure at Camp Cherryland, it was famous enough to be repeated to every camper ever to don the pink t-shirt.

Connor shuddered. "For some reason, that makes me think of a woman that I knew," he said. "She was supposed to be ax murdered, but instead ran away and became a gardener."

"Neat," said Rachael, unaware of this part of her mother's history. "Look, it's Soggy Wetbottom performing a dangerous dive from the creaky dock..."

Of course, this meant that the plank holding Rachael above the shallow and choppy waters of the lake immediately gave way and she tumbled down, hitting her head on a convenient sharp rock, thus rendering her unconscious in the dark and dangerous waters. Equally as conveniently, a thunderstorm immediately struck the lake, and all the campers and Andrew began squealing.

So it was that only two members of Camp Cherryland were brave enough to rescue Rachael from her demise at the bottom of a murky lake. As she sputtered water from her stressed lungs, she fluttered her eyes open, expecting to see Connor.

Instead, William grinned at her. "I told you, we're meant to be," he said. "I knew you from the minute I saw you."

"Holy crap!" Rachael said, sputtering and choking. There she did notice Connor to one side. "Why are you so familiar? Who were your parents, little boy?"

"I don't know. They gave me up because they were ashamed of me," William said, sending the ghost of a bad notion to Rachael's stomach. "My mother is very beautiful and clever, and has had far too many affairs, and my father is British. That's what my grandma told me. I was an accident, and my mother refused to raise me."

Rachael's worst fears were confirmed. "Is your grandma named Irina?" she asked.

"How did you know?" William asked.

"Because I'm your sister," Rachael said, ready to cry again. It was just as she feared -- a little brother to make moppethood worse.

"But you can't be my sister!" William protested loudly. "We're getting married!"

The situation proceeded to get more absurd, as Mary Cherry had sent Andrew to discover exactly what Rachael's condition was and if she had to call the Pryces to inform them of her unfortunate demise.

"None of that VC Andrews stuff around my assistant!" Andrew announced loudly, swooping down. "Where the hell were you? I had to make Hilary Haylie get my lyric book, and she trashed my cabin."

"She almost drowned just now," Connor pointed out. "William and I saved her."

"Be **that** as it may, Hilary Haylie, my Monica, has just quit the show, and two days before the big performance!" Andrew announced queenily, which means he didn't understand that Rachael had almost drowned and now believed that William was her unacknowledged little brother, sent to live with Aunt Irina and Uncle Jack because he would interfere with her prophecy moppethood by her evil mother. "That means Rachael, you're my Monica."

William smiled opportunistically, which meant he was excited, because as Chandler Bing, he would be pretend-married to Rachael as Monica. "I told you!" he said excitedly. "We're MEANT TO BE!"

Rachael groaned. "I want to die," she said, turning to Connor. "Kiss me?"

Connor kissed her. It was a very milquetoast kiss. Rachael sighed, curiously unsatisfied with the experience while knowing in her heart of hearts that her parents would be duly horrified and that she would have to kiss him again.

"It's so sad. You're just a pale imitation of my last daddy-issue-riddled bad boy boyfriend, and I don't know why," she mused. "But we can still be friends."

"Friends with benefits?" Andrew asked coyly.

"Ew, no," Rachael said. "Come on, let's get me suited up for Monica Geller magic."

The premiere of _Friends: The Musical!_ was a heavily anticipated event, both for parents of the Camp Cherryland campers, who had long since become accustomed to Andrew's campy romps through their favorite programs and bands, and for the Internet community that had long since stopped going outside in devotion to the long-finished show.

But she had no time for the boys and girls of the Internet; she was once against thrust into a thorny dilemma. The Pryces would be arriving shortly, and they would then be witness to Rachael's incestuous musical performance with her previously unknown little brother. The part of Rachael that enjoyed spiting her parents was exciting; the part of her that disapproved of incest, even simulated, was dismayed.

Finally, Andrew called them all together, babbled an incoherent affirmation, and then promptly sent his Ross and Rachel on-stage for the first number, "The When-Will-They Tango" with the immortal first line, "Since I learned the first of my wivin's/Had a serious taste for the muff divin'..." and complained loudly, "Damn it, Rachel-Amanda, it's step, pivot, shuffle shuffle pivot, not step step pivot shuffle pivot! Must you always ruin my creative vision?" when the frightened twelve-year-old scurried offstage. Rachael sighed.

Her parents were going to laugh at her. And then tell her to stop macking on her brother. Which meant that not only was she going to be forever Soggy Wetbottom? She was doomed to be known as Soggy Wetbottom Brother-Kisser.

"Your cue!" Andrew hissed, and dismayed, Rachael stumbled on-stage. Little William struck a pose and to Rachael's surprising, starting seducing the whole audience with his wisecracks. When Rachael dared to gaze up at her parents, she noticed that her father was grinning, and her mother was leaning against him.

"You know, I was, uh, thinking. If you and I had a big fight and broke up for a few hours..." William said.

"Yeah?" Rachael asked.

"Technically, we could...do it. So, what do you think... bossy and domineering?" William asked, putting his arms around her and looking for a kiss. Rachael grimaced, pecked him on the cheek, and they did their big "Monica loves Chandler" number to huge applause.

And the Pryces seemed down with this hideous sin against God and man. Maybe they were just enchanted by the Andrew Wells experience, Rachael wondered, as the show ended with a salute to the sitcom done by the Andrew Wells Tap Dancers, an elite brigade of kids prone to trying to use tap shoes to break principal fingers, leaving Rachael and the rest of the cast trying to evade injury.

It was only after the show, when Rachael saw Connor talking with her parents, that she decided to hustle over with William and see exactly what was going on with her brother, her parents, and her almost-boyfriend.

"Connor! I see you met my mom and dad," Rachael gushed, jumping into Connor's arms and giving him a big wet smack on the lips, which meant that Rachael was getting revenge on the Pryces for allowing her to do an incestuous musical at her summer camp. "Mom, Dad. How have you been?"

Mr. Pryce stared at Connor, then at Rachael. "Did you learn nothing from the Cordelia incident?" he asked Connor.

"I didn't know!" Connor complained. "How was I supposed to know she was your daughter?"

"What's wrong NOW?" Rachael asked. "Why do you care so much about Connor kissing me when you didn't mind me macking on my own brother in front of everyone at Camp Cherryland?"

"Brother?" Mrs. Pryce asked. "What the hell are you talking about? You don't have a brother."

"Oh, don't try to fool me. Doesn't **he** look familiar?" Rachael asked, picking William up. "And he's being raised by Aunt Irina and Uncle Jack?"

Mrs. Pryce grinned. "Oh, Rachael," she said softly. "William isn't your brother. He's Sydney's son by Julian Sark. It was a mistake she made before marrying Mr. Weiss. Irina offered to take care of him while Sydney and Nadia were off destroying Russian army bases for a few years."

"And why didn't you tell me that?" Rachael asked, looking at William Bristow sharply.

"Being an orphan's sexy," William said wickedly. "Got you hugging me, didn't it? I told you, we're MEANT TO BE. In ten years, we're gonna get married, just you wait and see."

Rachael suddenly wondered how exactly he had persuaded Haylie Hilary to quit two days before the show.

"Sigh," Rachael sighed. "Why didn't I just light Camp Cherryland on fire again?"

"Because Mary Cherry's trying to do it right now to collect insurance money?" Mrs. Pryce asked, pointing at the camp director, who was armed with a flamethrower.

Rachael groaned. After the unmitigated disaster that had been Camp Cherryland, she was even looking forward to Catholic School.

She shouldn't have, but I'm sure, as bright readers, you've realized that by now.

 


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight: The Sorrowful Samhain**

I have mentioned many times, in the tradition of a running joke, that Mrs. Pryce had a mortal rival in the form of one Mrs. Bree Van de Kamp, without ever being able to fully explore the levels of enmity between the two families and their suburban mistresses. Indeed, I find myself best able to explain the rivalry in terms of great historical ones, such as the Hatfields and the McCoys, the English and the French, those fans who prefer "the pretty" and those who use critical analysis, et cetera.

However, given the natures of both Mrs. Pryce and Mrs. Van de Kamp, a relative detente had settled over the neighborhood, though an arms race had gradually built up to make Christmas a miserable occasion for the rest of the neighborhood, outclassed as they were by the tasteful yet bright and jolly ornaments adorning their houses. Other holidays had followed suite, and this year, Mrs. Pryce had decided that she was going to get ahead of Mrs. Van de Kamp by emphasizing Halloween, or as the Pryces tended to refer to it (being specialists) Samhain.

"Samhain used to be the best party of the year," mourned Mrs. Pryce, draped with faux spiderwebs as she looked over a table covered in lists, blueprints, and red ink. "Days like this, I miss having an event planner. Rachael, honey, don't you have a meeting for Academic Decathlon?"

Rachael stopped sucking on her oversized soda pop to look up, smile, and shake her head. "I quit," she said. "The pressure is getting to me. I can't be a prophecy moppet and academic star at the same time."

"Then you can help Mommy plan the party!" said Mrs. Pryce, a perky gleam entering her calculating eyes. "Because I found out that Mrs. Van de Kamp is bringing in a ringer for her holiday planning."

"Don't do that," said Rachael petulantly, which meant she suspected that Mrs. Pryce was making fun of her. "I know that you're an Evil person, so being Miss Mary Sunshine isn't going to work with me."

"Oh, I think it will, because you won't like Mommy if she's in bad mood," Mrs. Pryce replied. "My party will beat Bree's, or I'll beat you."

Rachael snorted. "With a wire hanger?"

"There are wire hangers anymore?" Mrs. Pryce asked, pointedly ignoring the reference to the famous camp classic, _Mommie Dearest_. "Come on. You don't have anything better to do, and if I know Bree, she's up to something."

This in fact rather slandered Bree, who was uncomfortable with an overenthusiastic celebration of Samhain. While she was uncomfortable not because of dogmatic opposition (which would mean she was one of those people who believed the Harry Potter books taught children witchcraft), but because she was aware that Mrs. Pryce, at least, was capable of great Evil is immaterial. The visit of her son, Andrew, who had grown up from a vicious, indifferent bastard into a near-cliche gay man who was much more pleasant, had little or nothing to do with Mrs. Pryce's party plans.

However, this did not prevent Mrs. Van de Kamp from complaining rather volubly about Mrs. Pryce to her son.

"Mom," said Andrew, "I think you're overreacting. I saw her when Chris and I first got in, and she waved back."

"Well of course she did," Mrs. Van de Kamp replied with exasperation. "I didn't ever accuse Lilah of being **impolite**. She's simply a force of pure evil in the neighborhood."

"I don't understand," Andrew said. "Her house is as nice as yours, you guys share gardening tips, and she's not impolite. Why is she a force of pure evil again?"

Mrs. Van de Kamp sighed. "Honey, no offense, but you're just never going to understand," she said.

"Because I'm gay?" Andrew asked, a sore point between mother and son about to emerge.

"No, I learned to reconcile myself to that years ago, when we lived on Wisteria Lane," Bree replied. "It's because you're not a career housewife."

Meanwhile, at the Pryce home, Mrs. Pryce was saying nearly the same thing about Mrs. Van de Kamp.

"I don't trust someone that good who never dabbled in the Evil professions," Mrs. Pryce said, brooding as she tried to decide between mulled wine and applejack cider. "It's unnatural, Rachael. Rachael, are you listening to me?"

"No," Rachael said. "I don't see why I have to help you. I'm not even going to be at this stupid party."

Mrs. Pryce's right eyebrow rose. "Oh, you're not, are you?" she asked. "Where do you think you're going?"

"A party with **real** people," Rachael said with the typical prejudices of a teenager, a strongwilled child of Strictly Neutral parents, and a prophecy moppet. Hence, Mrs. Pryce could be forgiven for her poorly-hidden amusement, remembering her own headstrong teens.

"Will there be drinking?" she asked, deciding that Frankenweenies were a little **too** precious to be on the menu, despite the joy of forcing Bree to say the word.

"Nooooo," Rachael said with dubious vehemence. "It's just gonna be me, Mariah, and the Tonys. Possibly one or two other people."

"I think you'll have to ask your father," Mrs. Pryce said.

"Oh, mom!"

"He should be more involved in your calamities anyway," Mrs. Pryce said, wondering if there were any favors she could call in to make this party any easier.

So it turned out that on Samhain, while Mrs. Pryce was busily ordering around half a dozen temporary employees, and Mrs. Van de Kamp was having a heated discussion with son and husband whether or not to attend and what costume would demonstrate that she was not intimidated and that her display for Thanksgiving would much outdo the half-foreign Pryce family. Suburban politics, while often trivial, tended toward the violent in the Pryce neighborhood, and Dr. Van de Kamp was considering restraining his much-irritated wife with a pair of handcuffs from a cardboard box in his closet to prevent the bloodshed.

Which would have pleased Mrs. Pryce, had she been thinking of Bree at all. Instead, she was trying to locate her husband, who was being importuned by his daughter to allow her to completely miss the family party to attend the much cooler one being held in Mariah's basement.

"Your mum's worked her heart out for this, you know," Mr. Pryce said gently, pretending that his stack of paperwork wasn't growing exponentially with every moment he spent away from it. He seemed determined to ignore it as a final curse from the Quintivium, despite Mrs. Pryce insisting she could take care of it.

"To impress Mrs. Van de Kamp and her big gay son, not me," Rachael said cruelly but accurately. "I want to have fun. I don't want people to give me Significant Glances and ask about boyfriends. Oh, how I don't want them to ask me about boyfriends."

Mr. Pryce found himself remembering rather quickly that Rachael was not Lilah, as the comment almost ready to fall from his lips was, "well, it's not their fault you have bad taste in men." While Mrs. Pryce could easily enjoy the cruel humor, Rachael, much like other prophecy moppets, had no taste for dark comedy.

"Can you make a cameo?"

"Can I just sit and give candy to little kids?" Rachael countered. "That's all wholesome and stuff. Please, Dad? pleeeeeeeeeeeeze?"

Mr. Pryce relented. "Fine. But you are to be home by eleven o'clock, no later."

"Dad!"

"No whinging, Rachael. It's dreadfully unattractive," he said. "Now, I must return to my work."

Rachael stomped from the room, slammed the door, and called Mariah, excited. She had in fact been certain that Mr. Pryce would not allow her to attend the party at all, and the prospect had caused her to despair.

"M? It's me. I can go! I just have to hand out candy first..." she said in hushed tones. "I know! I KNOW!"

Mere hours later, Rachael found herself attired in her uniform skirt, two or three extra layers of lipstick, ripped tights, and high-heeled Mary Janes. Plus fake blond braids, all while sipping a fruity drink with a hint of alcohol, breathing in cigarette smoke, and watching bad movies.

"So Wesley really let you escape the party of doom?" Mariah asked. After the horror of Camp Cherryland, Rachael had taken to calling her parents by their given names in private, and her friends, with the exception of Straight Tony, had followed suit. "How did Lilah feel about that?"

"Lilah is having too much fun plotting Mrs. Van de Kamp's horrifying death by outWASPing," Rachael said, half-flirting with one of the skate punks dressed as clowns across the room. "She barely noticed my absence and said that she would have chosen a bra that lifted and separated. But she was small-talking with Mrs. Van de Kamp about cocktail weenies, so that was probably to upset her."

"Lilah is a very demanding mother," Gay Tony said. "But also very mysterious and sexy. I don't know how Wesley can compare."

"It's SUCH an act," Rachael mourned. "When I told her I quit Decathlon, she didn't even get mad. She just demanded I help 'Mommy' with her party."

Gay Tony, Straight Tony, and Mariah all sympathized noisily. "You know what we should do?" Gay Tony said two rounds of punch later. "We should **crash** Lilah's party."

Rachael thought about this with a shudder, but Straight Tony and Mariah were enthused suddenly. Mariah had not liked the looks the skaters were giving Rachael, and neither had Gay Tony.

"That is a cool idea," Mariah said. "We can totally see what the adults do when you're not around. I bet they'll be glad to see you."

Mariah had never heard the phrase famous last words, and for those readers who are unaware of the phrase, it means that the situation the speaker is about to encounter is an ironic disproving of those very words. Usually, it also means that the situation's irony is over-the-top.

Four police cars were loudly stationed outside Rachael's parents' house, and louder cries were coming from inside the house. Panicked, Rachael ran into the house and was absolutely shocked to see the scene inside.

Mrs. Van de Kamp was giving a statement to two officers, her eye swollen and blackened. Mr. Pryce was wearing a pair of handcuffs. Mrs. Pryce, who had apparently been dressed as June Clever or possibly Laura Petrie (Rachael, like most people of her age, was absolutely ignorant of the icons of the Golden Age of TV), was soaked to the skin, and glaring at Mrs. Van de Kamp.

"They don't even watch after that child," Mrs. Van de Kamp said. "There have been rumors her mother tried to poison her. And there was the arson..."

Rachael was surprised, to say the least, at the chaos. "I thought your party would suck," she said to her mother.

"Surprise," Mrs. Pryce said. "Mariah. Tony. Tony."

The trio of friends waved bashfully. One of the policemen approached Rachael. "Where have you been tonight?" he asked.

"At a party. Just three or four people and us," Rachael said. "Are you really going to arrest my dad? What happened?"

"Nobody's being arrested," Mrs. Pryce said. "The police came because Andrew called in for disturbing the peace, and the police found your father and Mrs. Van de Kamp in a compromising position."

For those of you who are in fact interested in events outside the life of the Prophecy Moppet, I will briefly sketch out what happened. Some callous bastard (Dr. Rex Van de Kamp) had tripled the alcohol content in all of Mrs. Pryce's punches. This led to a spirited discussion turning very noisy, Mrs. Van de Kamp dumping punch on Mrs. Pryce, Mr. Pryce getting up to intervene, another party guest jumping back and tripling the noise on the stereo, which woke up Andrew, who heard the blazing row, and phoned the police.

Meanwhile, Mr. Pryce's intervention had been foiled by Mrs. Pryce having a shrieking fit and trying to find her pumpkin-carving tools, Mrs. Van de Kamp chasing her around the table full of wholesome, decadent goodies, the aforesaid knife landing in a carved pumpkin meant to resemble a cat on a tombstone, and Mrs. Van de Kamp moving back so quickly as to land atop Mr. Pryce and knock them both onto the floor, and as the nearly-blind Mr. Pryce tried to assist them up, he accidentally sent Mrs. Van de Kamp reeling into a rounded lamp, causing her black eye.

The police arrived as a shrieking Mrs. Van de Kamp was being ministered to by a discombobulated Mr. Pryce as their respective spouses laughed and laughed, both being a little drunk at the time.

But to resume the other story:

"Yes," Mr. Pryce said. "It was an accident."

"Yes," Mrs. Van de Kamp replied. "But it doesn't mean this wasn't disturbing the peace."

The oldest police officer held up his hand. "Mr. Pryce, Mrs. Van de Kamp, I need you to come with me."

I wish, for the sake of the young moppet, that I was making this up, but I am not. Her father and her mother's worst enemy spent the night in jail, mostly because the police officer was disgusted that the adults, rather than drunken teenagers or college students, were the largest problem on that Halloween. In fact, what was truly unfortunate about the event was not the scandal, but that the scandal awoke certain higher powers to the existence of a Prophecy Moppet in a Strictly Neutral household.

Then, the one tapped into the police records, who I admit was Buffy Summers (she had finally decided to become a CIA agent) decided to contact Angel **and** contact Mrs. Van de Kamp about the curious happenings in the Pryce household and...

...well, the final set of events in Miss Rachael Pryce's young moppethood was about to be set in motion, so I will leave it at that.

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine: An Alien Abduction**

For the next two days, life in the Pryce household proceeded as it usually did. Both Mr. and Mrs. Pryce were rather subdued, thanks to their bizarre interaction with the police, but otherwise, life went on as usual.

Mrs. Pryce plotted to melt Mrs. Van de Kamp's lawn, Mr. Pryce suggested to Rachael that now was starting to be the time to consider what university she was going to apply to, Rachael spent much of her time bitching about her parents to her sympathetic friends. The sheer routine-ness of the routine comforted all three of them.

Then the Anglo-Saxon Messenger returned.

Rachael, who had never seen one before, was sitting upstairs, doing her homework while instant messaging about six of her friends about what parties they could attend that weekend, saw him while she was looking away and screamed.

"Mom! Dad! Something freaky is wiggling up toward our house!" she shrieked, knocking over her chair and thundering down the stairs. Mr. Pryce had been listening to opera while pouring over a manuscript, and Mrs. Pryce had just started making a ragout for the shark she was making for dinner. "I bet it's for us."

"Rachael, do calm down," Mr. Pryce said, getting up. "It's nothing to be alarmed about."

He opened the door, just before the Messenger knocked, and to Rachael's eyes, it certainly looked as though it was something to be alarmed about.

The Anglo-Saxon Messenger smiled very widely at Rachael. She, knowing it was impolite to stare, held her hand up and waved. In fact, she had dealt with weirder, and he was kind of funny. Even though her dad was staring at it weirdly even before it presented her father with a large, overly ornate envelope with the names of both her parents done in calligraphy.

"Thank you," Mr. Pryce finally said. He closed the door, turned, and went to the kitchen. Rachael tried to follow, but one look at the large envelope and Mrs. Pryce shook her head.

"Upstairs. Now."

Rachael, who was in that particular state best described as "spooked" did as her mother ordered. Not because she was an obedient child (neither of her parents put much stock in obedience as a virtue), but because she knew a place upstairs she could listen from without being impaired.

"What are we going to do?" Mrs. Pryce asked, sounding as though she were crying. "We can't outrun them."

"We can damn well try," Mr. Pryce said firmly, much to Rachael's surprise. "I'll be damned if anyone...and especially bloody Buffy...tells me how to raise OUR daughter."

"Wes, you haven't come up against the Court," Mrs. Pryce answered with a noisy sob. "I was the aide at a few of Holland's trials, and they do not fuck around. If they can't think of anything else, they will send assassins after her rather than have a moppet run about free."

"They've less than a year to wait," Mr. Pryce thundered. "Lilah, get ahold of yourself. If Rachael saw you, she'd die laughing."

"I don't care," Mrs. Pryce said. "Okay, I do care? But we're rapidly running out of options."

"Trust me," Mr. Pryce said in a low voice. "By tomorrow afternoon, I'll be ready."

Mrs. Pryce sniffled again. "Should we tell her?"

"Do you trust a moppet in possession of that information?" Mr. Pryce asked. "It will be all right."

Rachael, much shocked, almost spoke at that. Clearly, whatever had come in the message was so disturbing that both of her parents were manifesting characteristics that seemed alien to her. Her father's sudden decisiveness, the level of unreasoning panic in her mother's voice...it was far too much for her.

Now, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that both Pryces were well aware of Rachael's hiding spot, having each used it on occasion, and had rather overdone their reactions to provoke exactly that reaction. When Rachael meekly followed routine the next morning, it appeared as though their desperate plan had worked.

Sadly, though the Pryces had quite outsmarted their daughter, they had not, in fact, counted on the resources of the Court as well as their urgency in acting upon notices. Rachael, sure that her afternoon would prove to be eventful, hurried home. This allowed her to see something that she was not supposed to...namely, the removal of her home and parents by lifting the house into the sky.

"Oh, my God," murmured Rachael, eyes widening. This could not be happening, but at this point, she had accepted it was. "MOM! DAD! STOP!"

It was clearly no use. Her parents and their home had been abducted by the big pillar of white light, leaving behind exposed pipes, her mother's enormous rosebushes where the bodies were hidden, and a fluttering piece of paper. There wasn't even a sign of the dastardly abductors, black vans, helicopters, or Lincoln Town Cars. No evidence, no proof, no idea of who was friend or foe.

At first, then, Rachael was so defeated by the abduction of her parents that she didn't much pay attention to the piece of paper. But when it wouldn't stop fluttering back and forth in front of her, her typical cleverness reasserted herself, and she recognized that if her parents were taken by aliens or demons or Powers that Be, they would do their best to leave her a message, so she leaped on the piece of paper, cutting herself on three pointy thorns, and coming up, triumphant, with the note written by Mr. and Mrs. Pryce.

 _"Dear Rachael,"_ it said in her father's neat script. _"As you may know contingent on how much you eavesdropped last night, we have been determined Unfit Parents by the forces of Good and Evil, and our refusal to give you up or even go to trial for custody has forced a confrontation. We feel it only fair to admit that the Court is correct; we did intend to kidnap you, run away again, and live a life of Strict Neutrality whether you liked it or not. Your mother and I have discovered in our seventeen years of living together that we much prefer skepticism and neutrality to Good and Evil, and we have lived happy lives filled with love because of it. Furthermore, dearest of Rachaels, we feel that it is at last time to admit your destiny, which we learned one week before your birth, in a message given to us by an Anglo-Saxon Messenger. It is buried underneath your mother's purple rose-bush in a box that only you can open. We love you very much, dearest, and all of our hopes go with you. Love, your Dad."_

Rachael wiped away tears, both very sad because of her missing parents and because they had admitted that they loved her more than Rules of Good and Evil, and the Pryce Contract. She was about to resolve to disdain her destiny and seek after her parents, but the tears she'd shed while reading the note from Mr. Pryce brought up a second, even more secret note, written by Mrs. Pryce.

 _"PM,"_ it said in her mother's scribbly hand. _"Don't you DARE come looking for us. We've masterminded our capture so that you wouldn't be forced into any hasty decisions. Dad and I've done this before, it's kind of like a vacation, and besides. I've offered to make our guards soup for dinner and I don't like them nearly as much as I like you, or even Mrs. Van de Kamp. Read the letter, do what you have to. I'm so proud of you, and so is your father. REMEMBER YOUR TRAINING AND DON'T CRY SO MUCH. Mom."_

Rachael sniffled, but did not cry any more. Instead, she sat on the front step of her former house, and considered the situation. The Court, as run by the Powers and Partners, had stolen her parents and her house because they were Unfit, and kept running away from Destiny. On the other hand, her parents had just given her the tools to understand and thus manipulate her destiny, which means that they believed she could come up with a way to turn a catastrophic calamity into something much better.

It could also mean that they were tired of having a Prophecy Moppet and wanted to have a little brother, even though fifty and forty-nine seemed a bit old for a little brother. But with her mother's experiments in long life and youthening, they could probably live two hundred years, and thus, it was a perfect time for a little brother. Rachael wanted to cry. How could her parents leave at this moment?

Rachael then remembered the box. Running to the purple rose bush, she was about to dig up the roots with her bare hands when she discovered that the purple rose bush was gone. Being raised by very bright people, and being relatively clever herself when not overly conflicted by the demands of moppethood, Rachael realized a simple truth, which was that this was not good.

In fact Rachael realized that she needed to flee the area immediately, before trouble descended. This meant that she had to get out of Dodge, and with someone no one expected.

Two minutes later, she was standing on the Van de Kamp porch, knocking noisily. Mrs. Pryce had mentioned that morning that Andrew and his boyfriend were going home to Colorado, and the last thing anyone would expect was Rachael hitching a ride with the son of her mother's hated enemy.

"Hi," Rachael said when the door opened and it was Rex Van de Kamp. "Can I use your bathroom? I would use ours, but my house flew away with our parents in it."

Dr. Rex Van de Kamp, who was burdened with several flaws, did in fact have a sense of humor, and he laughed, letting Rachael into the Van de Kamp home.

"Bree, I told you that if you wished too hard, something like this would happen," he called into the kitchen.

"I didn't think the house would fly away, Rex," Bree said, emerging and shaking her head at him. "Are you all right? We spoke to this FBI...or was it CIA...agent yesterday about your family."

"I'm fine, except my parents were kidnapped by Higher Powers and I need to escape immediately to not be apprehended," Rachael said. "I know you hate my mom, Mrs. Van de Kamp, but you have to help me. What would you do if someone stole your family from you just because they were nosy?"

Mrs. Van de Kamp sighed, which meant she saw to the heart of the situation immediately. "I'm sure that Andrew and Bright can give you a ride," she said. "I don't know how hiding in a small Colorado town can help you, but your parents are unusual people, so I'm sure you're unusual, too."

"Bright?" Rachael asked. "I thought he was named Chris."

"No," Mrs. Van de Kamp said. "But he doesn't like his name, so he tells strangers he's named Chris. Andrew! Andrew, get out here! You have a passenger!"

Rachael sighed with relief. "You're not setting me up to be taken by CPS, are you?"

"No," Rex said firmly, and to Rachael's surprised, Mrs. Van de Kamp nodded along. "We learned a lesson about interfering with unusual children back in our old neighborhood once upon a time."

Andrew Van de Kamp emerged. "Yeah, mom?" he asked.

"You're taking Rachael to Everwood with you. I'm sure that father-in-law of yours can find a place to hide her," Mrs. Van de Kamp ordered in a comforting way.

"Okay," Andrew said nonchalantly, which meant that over the years of being ordered around by his mother, he had learned to accept the path of least resistance. "You're going to be jammed in the back with a lot of stuff. Do you have any luggage?"

"No," Rachael said tartly. "Hello, my house FLEW AWAY."

"Really?" Andrew asked. "Was that the noise going on outside?"

"Yes, Andrew," Mrs. Van de Kamp said. "Now, let's get Rachael something to eat, a toothbrush, a towel, and a change of underwear for her trip. Is there anything else you'll need, dear?"

Rachael pressed her lips together. "Did you happen to see someone dig up a box from under Mom's really big purple rosebush?" she asked. "It's kind of important, and I think the bad guys got it."

Mrs. Van de Kamp smiled triumphantly. "Not when the bad guys were taking away the only other person in the neighborhood who understood how to prune, they didn't," she said, going into the kitchen and delivering a small box to Rachael.

"Thank you," Rachael said, noting that there was no longer any dirt on the box and that the rosebush in question was now in Mrs. Van de Kamp's yard. But she was also aware that her mother would approve of such cutthroat behavior, and so she smiled. "It likes a live diet. Raw fish and such."

"Oh, I'm sure it does," Mrs. Van de Kamp said. "Come on, let's get you cleaned up, and don't worry about your mother's roses. I won't let anyone know any of their secrets."

Rachael sighed with relief. "That's exceptionally cool of you," she said, following Bree into the kitchen.

"Lilah is the closest thing I've had to a friend in years, dear," Mrs. Van de Kamp said with a peculiar note of sentimentality in her voice, meaning Rachael could not quite decide if it was worry or if it was pride. "If anyone's going to kill her in the end, it'll be me."

"I truly believe that, Mrs. Van de Kamp," Rachael said politely. "Let me wash my hands."

This, of course, proved to Rachael the truth of the weary old dictum about strange bedfellows. While Mrs. Pryce was nearby, Mrs. Van de Kamp would have died before assisting Rachael in a clearly shameless scheme to evade the law and destiny, as well as cover up for whatever illegalities made the rosebushes shine. But the bond between the rivals was deep and complex, and Rachael decided that it was more important to Mrs. Van de Kamp than the trivial nature of custodial decisions.

For the moment, she felt safe, but in her heart of hearts, Rachael knew that the respite was only temporary, and that until she was reunited with her beloved parents that matters were bound to get worse before they got better.

I am sorry to tell you that of course, Miss Pryce was quite right, but if you wish to go on believing that temporary rapprochement was solace, then that's as well.

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten: Evil in Everwood**

When we last left Rachael, she was faced with both the surprising nature of the bond between her mother and Mrs. Van de Kamp, the loss of her parents and home, and a box that contained her destiny. She was also dealing with the idea of a road trip with two gay men that would take them all the way from Illinois to Colorado. For those of you who are less than familiar with the route, this meant they would be taking the 80.

Interstate 80 is a flat, broad road that has the misfortune of crossing the dullest, least culturally relevant portions of the United States. Even those denizens (which means dweller, citizen, inhabitant, et cetera) who take offense to the term "flyover country" would be hard-pressed to defend the terrain traversed by I-80. But Rachael, who had been mewed in Winnetka due to neutrality, was excited about even the dullest territory. It was her traveling companions she feared.

Those fears were well-founded. While Andrew Van de Kamp was blessed with his mother's intelligence and that ineffable quality known as gumption, he was also less blessed with her restraint, and hence his cleverness easily bled over into evil. He wished Rachael Pryce no harm, but he also found it strange that his mother would deviate from her ideals of order to help the girl.

Troubles foreshadowed, it seems only fair to return to the story somewhere in Nebraska. Andrew's boyfriend, one Bright Abbott, had always been fond of teenage girls, and anyone who appreciated the classics of the 1990s and early 2000s. Rachael happened to be both, and they had "hit it off."

"How about that old Earth traditional song, Toxic?" Bright asked, making a reference of course to the episode of Dr. Who that used the Britney Spears pop hit. "I loved that whole album. My sister always made fun of me for it. She used to say it was really gay."

"That was mean of her," Rachael said. "Did she know you were gay?"

"No, she just thought I was a little slow," Bright said with an appealing grin. "Dude, you're going a hundred and five, Drew. Slow down."

"We're in Nebraska," Andrew said grouchily. "Who cares?"

"The Nebraska passer you're going to hit if you don't slow the hell down, okay?" Bright answered.

Nebraska passers, of course, are those drivers who use the left lane properly to pass...at the relatively slow speed they intend to go when they return to their lane. When one is going ninety or so miles an hour in the left lane and the Nebraska passer is going 75 in an attempt to pass the vehicle going 70, this often leads to a great deal of cursing. Rachael had learned all about them during this portion of her road trip.

"Fine. Be practical," Andrew said with a touch of self-mockery as he slowed the car.

I would continue the conversation, but needless to say, this captures the essence of Rachael's road trip with Andrew and Bright so well that it would be sheer reiteration. And of course you know what they say about reiteration.

Everwood, Colorado, then, was where our moppet found herself, heartsick yet at the loss of her parents, worried about the effect her disappearance would have on her grades that might prevent her escape to college, and curious about who had stolen her house and what they wanted with her. It was a pleasant, smallish mountain town, with more than enough medical professionals, who all seemed to be related.

Bright and Andrew, whose apartment was too small to accommodate Rachael, introduced the young lady to Bright's family, the Abbotts, and their pleasant, if somewhat large, home. There was a slight bit of friction at first between Dr. Harold Abbott and Rachael, due to her uncertain status.

"Bright, you transported a minor across state lines," he said. "Isn't Andrew supposed to be smarter than that? After all, you told me he does the hard thinking for you. Apparently..."

"Harold," said Mrs. Abbott, interrupting the tirade. "Be reasonable. I'm sure there's a good reason for this."

"My house flew away and crazy people are looking for me," Rachael said. "It's all here in this magic box. You know, the one that makes me sound good and crazy right now?"

She pulled out the box, blew on it (as dust seemed unnaturally attracted to it), and almost opened it. But Mrs. Abbott shook her head at husband and son.

"I think we ought to trust Bree's judgment," she said sternly.

"Trust Bree?" Dr. Abbott asked. "Because she's a shining beacon of sanity and moderation?"

Mrs. Abbott made a very disapproving noise that reminded Rachael of her own, now-suddenly-very-missed mother. "Because when has Bree Van de Kamp broken the law when it comes to her neighbors?"

Dr. Abbott swallowed his pride, unaware of a situation years back that involved Andrew and one Mrs. Solis. "Fine," he said. "You must have some very interesting family, um..."

"Rachael," said our heroine. "Rachael Elizabeth Morgan-Pryce. I'm apparently full of destiny. And possibly evil. Or possibly great good. I don't know, because I'm being raised strictly neutral and full of skepticism and other critical thinking principles."

"Good for your parents," Dr. Abbott said. "Destiny is something nobody should be messing with until they're good and ready."

Rachael took that as a sign that Dr. Abbott would not inform the proper authorities, and sighed in relief.

Her relief was misplaced and short-lived, but at least Rachael Pryce got to face the morning having gotten a good meal, good sleep, and a whirlwind tour of Everwood at the hands of Mrs. Abbott, who had been the mayor of the small town for many years. She was a very empathetic ear, listening carefully to Rachael's woes.

"That sounds like quite a busy life, dear," Mrs. Abbott said. "And so are you planning to save your parents? Graduate high school? Follow your destiny?"

"All of the above?" Rachael said.

"That's an admirable goal," Mrs. Abbott said, turning them the corner onto her street. Rachael should have noticed, of course, that there were police lights glowing, but she was too busy considering her considerable dilemma. "But how are you going to do that? Especially when you don't know who you're up against?"

Rachael sighed. "I wish my mom and dad were here," she said. "They always know what to do."

"I'm sure you know what to do, too," Mrs. Abbott said. "You just...Andrew Van de Kamp, what on earth is going on? Why are there police cars at my house?"

Andrew was flanked by an older man with a grizzled beard and little glasses, and a dark haired man with funny hair. Rachael's stomach sank into her knees (I don't have to tell you that this was metaphorical instead of literal, of course), and she knew the trap had been sprung.

"They're here for me, Mrs. Abbott," Rachael said. "And you're a slimy little weasel whose mom should kick his betraying ass!"

This, of course, was aimed at Andrew, who indeed was a slimy little weasel. His mom had occasionally disciplined his betraying ass, as well, but he had learned from Mrs. Van de Kamp the art of being so free from his emotional roots that he could imagine anything.

Thus, he merely snorted. His companions, however, looked slightly uncomfortable.

"You're making this much harder than you need to, Miss Pryce," the older man said. "We're here to protect you."

"Oh?" Rachael asked. "Then you could bring my parents home and give me back to them!"

The dark-haired man, who reminded Rachael, out of the blue, of her camp counselor friend Connor, sighed heavily. "That's not an option, and you know it."

"Then fuck you, dillhole," Rachael said, shocked at how vituperative her language could become when she was in the presence of people she instinctively knew she didn't like. "You took away my mom and dad! I hate you!"

"That's to be expected," the old man said. He was looking at Rachael like she was a lab experiment, and for some reason, she felt she ought to know him. "My name is Arvin Sloane. This is Angel. We're here to take you to Los Angeles to fulfill your destiny."

The world symbolically collapsed on Rachael's head with a loud ker-thunk.

"No!" she screamed, reaching for Mrs. Abbott. "I won't go! Screw you!"

The temper tantrum went on for a while as Rachael schemed. She knew that her removal to Los Angeles at the hands of these well-meaning bastards was a _fait accompli_ (meaning, of course, that it was inevitable), it was worth the extra trouble to a) discomfit them, b) learn something about their personalities while doing so, and c) show Mr. Arvin Sloane and this Angel guy that no daughter of Wesley Wyndam-Pryce and Lilah Morgan was going to be ordered around like some everyday slayer or ordinary prophecy moppet, no sir.

Finally, she tired of the fussing, and threw herself on the ground limply. "Fine. Kidnap me," she said. "But I swear to God, I will get my parents back and get revenge on every little bitch who sold me out."

In fact, Rachael got an early start. As she was put in the back seat of a dark sedan, she pulled out her cell phone and made one call...to Bree Van de Kamp.

It was hardly enough to lift her dreary, dread-tightened spirits, but it was enough to remind her that to defeat her enemies, she had to start somewhere.

 


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter Eleven: Dealing With Destiny**

At this point, I feel it necessary to roughly sketch the full depths of the dilemma Rachael Pryce found herself in by her removal to Los Angeles and her semi-legal custodial arrangement with Angel and Mr. Sloane.

In fact, roughly sketching would take too long. Let me sum up: in years past, the forces of Good and Evil had found themselves interacting in the form of intermediaries, as of course the idea of two concepts interacting is an impossibility. As centuries and eons passed, some felt that the idea of Good and Evil was too binaristic, which means roughly too easily divided and simplified.

Mostly, because shades of grey don't sell very well outside of Europe, these people were ignored. Both Pryces, in their hearts of hearts, were such people. Their tragedy was, in fact, that they were also people who were incurably curious about first causes, behind the scenes, and the nature of the universe, which meant they were inevitably swept into the binaristic world of destiny. Mrs. Pryce had come down on the side of Evil, Mr. Pryce on the side of Good. They had soon learned this only led to the misery of a lot of people trying to do their best.

Hence, Rachael had been raised in an entirely alternate system, where good and evil were never capitalized, and destiny was something that crazy people talked about. This is why she was so horrified at her own destiny-having, and why her continued resistance persisted, despite the evidence. The Pryces had succeeded...beyond their worst nightmares. Rachael was almost totally unprepared to handle the onslaught of Good that was now waiting for her.

The first inkling Rachael had that she might not be cut out for championhood was the way that Angel immediately seized the box containing information about her destiny.

"Hey, hair-head!" she yelled, struggling vainly. "How am I supposed to prepare for my destiny if I don't know it?"

"It should have come from years of training, but your **mother**  screwed that up," Angel groused. It is also necessary to explain that Angel's disdain for Mrs. Pryce was so legendary that he couldn't manage to hide it in front of her only daughter, even knowing this was poor parenting.

"Oh, whatevs," Rachael said, flopping on the couch in Angel's half-renovated, half-dilapidated hotel that he maintained because in this reality, he had never become the head of Wolfram and Hart, Los Angeles. "My mom taught me how to shoot when I was seven. I could pop a cap in your ass from two hundred yards."

"That's not what a champion needs to know," Angel said. "A champion should be able to recognize where she's needed and do what's right instinctively. A champion should have a kind heart and the strength of will to do what's right."

Rachael burst into laughter. Both parents had instilled her with a deep skepticism of overblown rhetoric, as both had been deceived by it. Mr. Pryce, in particular, as a teacher of classics, knew all the devices and taught Rachael to identify and ignore them.

"Did you get that off the Wheaties box?" she asked. "My dad would tear that to pieces before you could say _summa cum laude_."

Angel realized almost immediately that he was out of his depth. His specialty was with self-loathing brooders, and when confronted with the vain, confident child of his best friend and worst enemy, who had apparently given her all their vices to go along with their virtues? He was unable to think of a way to curb the malicious influence of neutrality.

"Do you believe in anything at all?" he asked. "Just out of curiosity, what did your parents raise you to think?"

Rachael pretended to ponder this. She had also realized that Angel was out of his depth, and wondered exactly how he would cope with his failure as a surrogate parent. She was also wondering if there was a way to get in touch with her beloved Uncle Jack and Aunt Irina, as they were the two people most likely to know how to retrieve her missing parents and home.

"My mom taught me it's all fun and games until you get caught, and if you get caught, lying is a waste of time," she said, pretending honesty. "My dad taught me that wisdom comes from within, and that charismatics are usually also jerks. Also, buy low, sell high, and never drive an American car."

Rachael might have continued her endless jokes at the expense of her temporary guardian, but at that moment, Mr. Sloane arrived. Mr. Sloane, Rachael recognized, was an altogether different kind of guardian.

"Has Angel briefed you on what's coming?" he asked.

"No," Rachael said. "He told me that I had to act more like a champion and then started monologuing and hating on my mom."

Mr. Sloane rolled his eyes. "That's counterproductive," he said. "In short, we've discovered that in the relatively near future, you will play a decisive role in a great battle. The reason Angel has been selected to be your tutor is that his original destiny matches yours in most respects, except that he chose against a path that would allow him to fulfill it."

"Yeah, what's that?" she asked.

"He could go good or evil, and no one knew what path he'd take," Sloane said with a shrug.

Rachael immediately saw the logical fallacy in everyone's behavior. "Then why the heck did you guys take me AWAY from my parents, who were raising me up to follow that destiny? What the hell is wrong with you people? Are you all crazy power-mad fools who need a time-out? Or are you just bitter because this destiny crap ate your lives and not my parents'?"

Sloane listened to the tirade patiently. "Clearly, your diatribe suggests that you're unaware of what can go wrong when you're ill-informed about the nature of the universe," he said.

"You're trying to trick me," Rachael said. "That doesn't make ANY SENSE at all. I knew I had a destiny. I just...don't have any strong preferences about your little Good and Evil clubs. And I think that's JUST FINE!"

She started to cry. Not for real, because as I said, Rachael knew the value of manipulation. But because it would buy her time, as both men were sure to think Rachael mourned her lost parents and was seemingly lost without their guidance. While Rachael did indeed rue that she didn't have either parent's guidance, she was realizing that they had been such effective antagonists that everyone else seemed easy.

"Angel, I think Rachael and I need to have a talk, and possibly something to eat," Sloane said. "She might take well to Nadia, as well."

"She and Connor get along, too," Angel said, while Rachael continued to sob. She'd almost forgotten that Connor was Angel's son. "Remember, she needs to stay here. Buffy will be here in a day or two, and I think Buffy will be able to handle her much better than we can."

Rachael wiped her eyes, suddenly recovering from her tears. This Buffy person sounded interesting, but escape from Angel, particularly now that she remembered who Sloane associated with, was vital. "No offense? But I want to take the drive with Mr. Sloane. Can I call you Uncle Arvin?"

Angel and Mr. Sloane stared at Rachael. "I...suppose," Sloane said, clearly despising his name.

"Uncle Jack always let me call him Uncle Jack," Rachael said, continuing her manipulation with a smile. "Can we visit him, Uncle Arvin? Please? I promise to listen all about heroism and championitis and stuff if I can just see my Uncie Jack and my Auntie Irina!"

It was worth it just to watch both men cringe, our heroine decided. Her mother's cruel love of tormenting a defanged crowd was serving Rachael well, and her father's gift of finding just the right pressure points to apply that cruelty wasn't failing her, either.

"I suppose that's acceptable," Sloane said. "Let's go."

The car ride to the Bristow-Derevko household deep in the Los Angeles hills was excruciatingly boring. Sloane rambled on endlessly about how power needed to be understood to be used, and how his pursuit of some guy named Rambaldi had shaped him. Rachael decided that he was now her Crazy Uncle Arvin, and smiled and nodded.

Aunt Irina was tending a small rosebush when Crazy Uncle Arvin's car pulled up in her driveway. Before Rachael could emerge, Aunt Irina had a gun out.

"Hi, Aunt Irina!" Rachael cried loudly, waving. "Uncle Arvin brought me for a visit."

"Rachael?" Irina asked, stunned. "What are you doing here?"

"Uncle Arvin and his friend Mr. Angel took me into protective custody for my own good," Rachael answered, sparkling. "Apparently my parents have done me a great wrong, so they're flying above us all in our house."

Irina could move much faster than she should have, and she had her arm around Rachael, shepherding the girl into the house while Uncle Arvin could only follow and glower.

"Your parents are out of the picture?" Irina asked. "They have them confined?"

"Yeah," Rachael said. "We have to get them back. Do you know how?"

"Maybe," Irina said. "You are supposed to be a champion, according to...Arvin, are you trying to eavesdrop?"

"Just making sure you're not corrupting our moppet, Irina," Arvin said. "Hello, Jack."

"Uncle Jack!" Rachael cried, fleeing to her uncle. "Aunt Irina says there's something champions can do to get their parents back. Do you know what it is?"

Uncle Arvin looked sour. "Don't answer her, Jack."

"I shouldn't know this," Jack said. "But while I was searching for ways to liberate Sydney from her fate, I stumbled upon the Court of Champions. It's very dangerous, Rachael. And you will have to follow your guardian's orders while you make the initial filing."

"Lessons in Goodness and honor and champion-ness?" Rachael asked. "My parents will be so sore at me if I do that..."

"Your parents will be happy to be free of the flying house," Uncle Arvin (who was much more practical than say, Angel) said.

"Probably, anyway," Aunt Irina said mysteriously. "I'm sure they have faith in you, Rachael, and aren't in any danger."

Rachael sighed. Had nobody learned yet that expecting the best for her would only end up in tragedy and overblown worry? Things were not going to end up so easy as they said, and Rachael knew it.

Or perhaps she was wrong. After all, succumbing to fatalism is never the solution.

 


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter Twelve: The Custodial Court of Champions**

A prolonged legal battle is one of the more curious ways of maintaining order in polite societies. Many feel that the perfectly non-violent proceedings mask a darker, more ominous reality. These people are of course correct; courtrooms have shed more blood and caused more chaos than any grand melee or battle. In many ways, this secret knowledge was what originally drew Mrs. Pryce toward the law and then toward Wolfram and Hart in her life as Miss Morgan.

This same knowledge seemed to tingle in Miss Rachael Pryce's fingertips as she entered the ominous, creaking courtroom where she would be protesting for the innocence of her parents when it came to the derailing of her destiny. As it stood, Miss Pryce knew that the truth would only get the Pryces in more trouble, because they were guilty. But it was a particularly innocent type of guilty, meaning that everyone in the courtroom, including the litigants, knew that Rachael's parents had sought to allow Rachael full control of her inevitable destiny, and fewer psychological wounds than most prophecy moppets.

Rachael would never admit it before the grim but attractive Buffy (the court's bailiff), but she believed that Slayerhood had perhaps warped Buffy's perspective so she could not quite grasp why Wesley and Lilah had so strenuously argued for Rachael's temporary freedom. To Buffy, it seemed very simple. The Pryces had dodged destiny, and they were unfit. Rachael -- especially after her talk with Aunt Irina and Uncle Jack -- believed the destiny-dodging made them particularly fit. And so she would nervously argue before the judge.

I will also confess for Rachael that while her anxiety was a real thing, she was also tingling with excitement. All of the people she had loved and hated over her turbulent teens were now witnesses and spectators at the trial, excepting her parents, whose roving imprisonment proved harder to overcome than Buffy, Angel, and Arvin Sloane had believed.

"Your **mother** had something to do with that, didn't she?" Angel asked.

"My mother blah blah blah," Rachael retorted. "What IS it with you and my mother? She's left you alone for nearly eighteen years. You could try the whole get the hell over it thing, you know."

Fred had giggled at the time. "He's jealous," she said. "Your momma's had Wes all to herself for all those years, and Angel thinks it's only fair to share."

Rachael, adamantly disgusted at the sheer selfishness, stuck her tongue out at Angel. "No wonder they left," she said. "If I had to put up with all your whining, I'd starting screwing with you, too. Just to alleviate the endless bitching."

Aunt Irina had snorted from her seat in the audience, and Mr. Sloane, who was still sulking over Rachael's apt nickname "Crazy Uncle Arvin," looked darkly at the errant moppet.

"Well?" Rachael asked the counsel sitting next to her at the table. "What do you think, Mrs. Van de Kamp?"

"I'm still not sure why you chose me to assist your case, Rachael sweetie," Bree Van de Kamp confessed. "I think a lawyer would be a much better choice. After all, your mom's old law firm is apparently representing the other side."

"Well, I wanted my mom to litigate for me," Rachael said. "But I couldn't get her, so I got the closest thing to her."

Mrs. Van de Kamp blushed. Whether or not she was touched or embarrassed at the comparison, Rachael and the rest of the court did not know. Meanwhile, Uncle Jack, who had gathered most of Rachael's evidence at the moppet's request, tapped her on the shoulder.

"We're ready, Rachael," he said. "You need to call the judge in now."

Rachael got to her feet. The whole champion thing was vexing the living daylights out of the young moppet, as she felt that it was needlessly complicated with courtesies and archaic attitudes that obscured the real things going on. Only in a world where labels mattered so much, reasoned the moppet, could the forcible separation of a girl from her loving parents be seen as a good thing by the forces of Good. Especially when the parents had done such a good job...

"Rachael," Mrs. Van de Kamp said. "Don't get too involved in your interior monologues yet."

"Sorry," Rachael said. "This is new and scary. Anyway. As a champion and one in need of justice, I call upon the court of champions for redress of ill, for restitution of...erm, affairs, and for..."

Smoke, and a blinding flash of light, suddenly burst over the room and its occupants. None of them were surprised -- these were the usual mystical accouterments. In fact, Spike and Connor, who were in a metaphorical doghouse due to their previous romantic engagements with Miss Pryce, both yawned.

(I will also add that young William Bristow, the boy who believed himself to be Miss Pryce's destined lover, was also in attendance with his mother, who was rather appalled that her son adored the volatile young prophecy moppet. Agent Sydney Bristow, no matter what her legal surname at the moment, could be very conservative when it came to love. William, of course, was determined to ignore his mother, but that is not currently important. Simply interesting, given that the courtroom was full of various people in various struggles with destiny and family.)

What was surprising, was the judge who appeared from the mystical light and noise show. In fact, it was so surprising that Fred, who had been chattering with Emma Frost about time-phase shifts and how light and smoke were a necessary byproduct of the same, fainted.

"Judge Cordelia Chase, presiding," Buffy Summers said, as stunned as everyone else. "How on earth..."

"There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, yada yada," Judge Chase said. "So, where's the litigant?"

Rachael Pryce, who was the only person in the entire courtroom ignorant of Judge Chase and her illustrious career (well, with the exception of the Abbotts and the Van de Kamps, who didn't inhabit that sort of universe except under protest), stumbled to the bench. "That's me, ma'am," she said. "I'm here today to prove that the custody orders filed by Mr. Arvin Sloane and Mr. Angel are incorrect. That I do not belong in the hands of those who would raise me toward destiny, and that I have been trained quite adequately by my natural parents, who are being imprisoned against their eighth and fourth amendment rights. Also, I think maybe their third amendment rights."

"You think that the court's quartered soldiers in their house?" Cordelia asked. "Young lady."

"Sorry," Rachael said, not at all sorry, as she was quite certain the other side didn't know any of the amendments. "We'd just gotten up to amendments before my education was tragically disrupted by the untrustworthy motives of my current guardians."

Judge Chase, whose mouth was half-open in amazement, took a second, closer look at her litigant. "Oh, God, you are so just like both your dad and mom," she said. "You're Wes and Lilah's kid, the one with the Angel-destiny, aren't you? You even do that little look that Wes does when he's been interrupted and he's pissy. Also, you were tapping your foot like your mom waiting to buy shoes. No wonder I got this case."

Angel's chief lawyer, a Wolfram and Hart minion whose name is so unimportant that it currently slips this narrator's mind, cleared his throat. "And that is why, Judge Chase, you must rule in favor of Mr. Sloane and Angel," he said. "You are well acquainted with the characters of Mr. Pryce and Miss Morgan, and must know that the idea of the two raising **such** an important player in the upcoming Apocalypse is absurd. Further, we intend to prove that the Pryces went beyond neglect in their upbringing of young Rachael. Their insistence on moral neutrality is an active attempt to obstruct, er...destiny."

"No, it's not!" Rachael shouted, stamping her foot. "My mom and dad love me, and all this Good and Evil stuff just makes you crazy stupid!"

"Your mom and dad are selfish and self-centered people who ran away from destiny and what they were supposed to do!" Angel yelled.

"Yeah, die for your stupid ass!" Rachael shrieked. "They were right! They were so right and you're just jealous because your son HATES YOU!"

Somewhere in the audience, a muttered, "oh, snap," emanated from somewhere near the vicinity of Bright Abbott, but that was ignored as Judge Chase took suddenly control of the courtroom.

"Silence!" she roared, and everyone found themselves unable to speak. "I will not have my courtroom turned into a television talk show. This isn't Judge Judy."

(For those of you unaware of the latest daytime television, Judge Judy is of course a program where small claims are contested for television, and features a gruff woman laying down the law. It is surpassingly wonderful spectacle, despite its sketchy resemblance to correct courtroom procedure.)

"Okay, then," Judge Chase said, clearing her throat. "I don't want to have to smite anyone, especially given this is one big family reunion. So basically, what we're dealing with is the Powers and the Partners and their various representatives are really, really freaked, right? Because you know, Wes and Lilah with their very own prophecy moppet? Scary on so many levels."

"Yes," the Wolfram and Hart lawyer said. "We contend they are unfit to handle the child at this delicate stage of her development."

"Got it," Judge Chase said. "Meanwhile, our champion-to-be says that Wes and Lilah are better parents than any alternatives, and that being raised morally neutral is a much better idea than getting caught in the partisan politics before she's capable of understanding them."

"That's right, your Honor," Rachael said.

Judge Chase considered this with a serious expression on her face. "Okay," she said. "Rachael, come here."

Rachael, with a nervous glance at both Mrs. Van de Kamp and Uncle Jack, got up and walked to the bench.

"My God, you look like both of them," Judge Chase said. "How are your parents, anyway?"

"Not dead," Rachael said. "They seem pretty happy, most of the time. Dad's head of classics at Northwestern, and Mom gardens and does evil occasionally."

Judge Chase chuckled. "Sounds about right," she said. "Now, it's clear to me that the evidence I need is inside Miss Pryce's head, as I could listen to you buttheads talk all day and not really get whether or not fit parenting's been going on. So Rachael, you need to close your eyes."

Rachael obeyed, and felt Judge Chase put her fingertips on Rachael's forehead. Another light display followed, with Fred quietly explaining to anyone who would listen that what Cordy was doing was imbibing Rachael's unbiased memories of various important events of the last three to five years that could determine whether or not the Pryces were good guardians.

"It'd be a lot more fun if we could watch, too," Mary Cherry said. She was out on good behavior. "After all, I heard something about a goldfish?"

"SHUT UP ABOUT MY GOLDFISH!" Rachael cried. After all, she was still quite young and the death of Winkums still rankled. "We were homeschooling at the time."

The whole court found themselves laughing at that.

Finally, Judge Chase finished her examination and let the young prophecy moppet go. "Well," she said. "That didn't make anyone look very good..."

Everyone grimaced.

"Except the Pryces."

Everyone grimaced twice as hard, except for Rachael, who felt her heart lifting with hopes that not even she could bring herself to dash. Indeed, cruel fate would have to do that...if, in fact, that was fate's idea.

"Did my parents do okay?" Rachael asked Judge Chase. "Does this mean I get to go back to them?"

"Duh," Judge Chase said. "In fact, you should be nicer to them. They're trying really hard, despite their own predilections. Ew, did I just say predilection? You get my point."

"Does this mean there's a happy ending in store for me?" Rachael asked. Judge Chase chuckled. "What?"

"I think sending you home to your mom and dad is an ending," Judge Chase said. "However, for all the nuisance value of this case, I sentence everyone who has made my day that much less Zen to go home with you to make sure the Pryces haven't suffered from their imprisonment. That means YOU, Angel."

"Does that mean me, too?" William Bristow asked.

Judge Chase looked at the young boy. "Hey, aren't you the one who...yes. You should definitely go along," she said.

Rachael looked at Judge Chase, and at William, and groaned.

"Why me?" she asked Mrs. Van de Kamp, sitting down and shaking her head.

"Because it's your destiny," Mrs. Van de Kamp said. "Now say thank you to Judge Chase."

For once, Rachael did feel gratitude, so she looked up and smiled, despite her foreboding that nothing could be this easy.

"Thank you, Judge Chase."

 


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter Thirteen: The Rotten Resolution**

When we last left our darling Prophecy Moppet, to borrow Mrs. Pryce's affectionate denigration of her only daughter, she had found herself in the strange position of being quite content. Judge Cordelia Chase of the Custodial Court of Champions had weighed the evidence, and found that her parents' fitness to parent was impeccable, meaning they were more competent than the pack of yahoos who'd tried proving otherwise.

Rachael now found herself in a situation where everyone wanted to go home and greet her parents with her. Even her so-called nemeses, Mr. Sloane and Mr. Angel. It seemed rather conspiratorial of them.

"You're going to do bad things to my parents," she said suspiciously to Mr. Sloane. "Aren't you?"

"Actually, I'm more interested in what they're up to," Crazy Uncle Arvin admitted. "There are plenty of years to corrupt you, but one always likes to congratulate the competition."

"Yes," Aunt Irina agreed. "It usually forges false feelings of good-will that can be brought up for taunting later. Besides, we need to make sure that your parents are quite proud of you."

"For what?" Rachael asked, quite confused. "I did a lot of fussing around and not very well. My parents will probably critique my form, and a lack of a sense of style."

"Yes, I'm sure they will," Mrs. Van de Kamp said. "But they're still proud of you, sweetheart. You saved the day."

Pondering that imponderable, and rather cloying, paradox, Rachael allowed herself to be led out of the courtroom and toward the inevitable journey home. Once again, in a dim alley that had been the entryway to the transdimensional space of her courtroom, she looked over her friends and said what she was thinking.

"This is a surprisingly large escort," she said, trying not to smile. "I'm not letting it slow me down. I haven't seen my parents for nearly three months, and as nice as it is to see you? I want to go home."

Miss Emma Frost chuckled. "Your parents are very resourceful people, Rachael," she said, exchanging a knowing glance with Aunt Irina, which irritated Rachael because she was very unsure what they knew. "I'm sure they managed to entertain themselves while keeping a discreet eye on events."

As it turns out, this was an understatement, but before I get ahead of myself again, as I so often do, let me give an abbreviated version of the journey from Southern California to Winnetka. Rachael was right; it was a surprisingly large escort, and to accommodate them all, they had to borrow a private jet from a wealthy friend of Miss Frost's who looked oddly like William's father, Mr. Julian Sark. Of course this was not without complications, as Spike and Angel were both vampires and had to stay in a darker section of the plane, and Uncle Jack did not approve of Connor giving young William tips in the romancing Rachael department.

For Rachael's own opinion, she was not in the mood to be romanced, not with Spike, Connor, and William Bristow buzzing around and her parents still hovering above the North Shore without any clue the tribulations Rachael had gone through to retrieve them. She was certain they were panicked about their inability to intervene, which shows that she was unaware that Mr. and Mrs. Pryce had a very complicated relationship without her, and this was their first vacation in seventeen years from her. But she did miss them deeply, and found all her friends attempting to stand _in loco parentis_ a little absurd and sad.

Just like Judge Chase promised, the house settled on its foundations just when the car carrying Rachael, Aunt Irina, Uncle Jack, and Dr. Abbott pulled into the driveway. Dr. Abbott had complained the whole way about the air conditioning being on too high, but Uncle Jack had fixed him with one of the evil glares, and he'd stopped and told Rachael about how glad he'd been when his daughter Amy came home, back when she'd been about her age.

"Was this before or after Bright became a fabulous lounge singer with Ephram as his pianist?" Rachael asked. Dr. Abbott blinked, unaware that Bright had shared that anecdote during the long road-trip to Everwood.

"Before. I hope," he said, clearly uncertain. "Look, we're here!"

Rachael was out of the car before it stopped, almost spraining her ankle again. The door swung open easily, but there were no parents waiting. "Mom? Dad? I'm home!" she called.

Terror bit into the girl's heart when no one answered. Had the guards succeeded in harming her parents after all? But Judge Chase had promised they were safe and sound in the house. Rachael trailed through the house, noting that every last bit of furniture had been rearranged, and that someone had taken up painting in her absence.

"Mom? Dad?" she asked, pushing open the door to the parental bedchamber. "Didn't anyone call you? Where ARE YOU?"

There was a smothered chuckle from behind Rachael, and as she spun, she got the most unpleasant shock of the past six months.

"I told you it was today, Wes," said her mother. Mrs. Pryce had undergone a few changes since her daughter had last seen her, and though they were pleasant enough, Rachael's eyes couldn't quite make her brain believe they were real. "Put on a robe and get out here, lover."

It looked like her mother, but she was younger. Smiling. Wearing a ridiculous red dress.

And most surprisingly of all, Mrs. Pryce was pregnant.

"Aunt Irina and Uncle Jack are here," Rachael said, staring at the lump in her mother's midsection. "What did you two **do?** I can't believe that I leave you alone and then boom!"

"Aww, moppet," said Mrs. Pryce, grinning viciously. "I think in this case, it's and then, bang."

"Lilah!" Mr. Pryce said, emerging from the closet in one of his wife's satin robes, making him look ridiculous. He was younger, too, and it seemed obvious that Rachael's suspicions had been correct: they'd been working on a Youthening Formula, which meant Rachael's feelings went from bad to worse. "You look well, Rachael. How was your enforced absence?"

"Scary, unfortunate, eventful...but not as bad as this," Rachael said, stomping off. "A little brother! I go away and you decide I need a little brother!"

Aunt Irina, Uncle Jack, Dr. Abbott, and the next carload of well-wishers were in the living room. "Something wrong?" Aunt Irina asked.

"They're having a baby," Rachael said, fully discomfited by the ruin of her long-expected homecoming. "Geez, it's disgusting. You'd think they had something better to do besides chase each other naked around the house."

"Now, now," Dr. Abbott said soothingly. "You don't know if they were naked."

"Oh, they were naked," said Miss Burkle with a chirrup of dismay in her voice, which meant she still wasn't quite comfortable with Mr. Pryce and Miss Morgan's long and happy marriage. "I have no doubt of that."

"Well, good to hear," said Mrs. Pryce, resplendent in her red dress. She had dressed up like Becky Sharpe, largely because in six months, even chasing her husband around the house had gotten dull, and Mrs. Pryce was in constant need of distraction. "Irina, Jack. Good to see you."

"You look well," Uncle Jack said. "Figure out the formula for youth, did you?"

"Maybe," Mrs. Pryce said coquettishly, a hand on her swollen belly. "And then again, maybe not."

Which was a way for Mrs. Pryce to insinuate that she had spent most of the last months chasing her husband around the house naked, and that part of the reason for the constant moving of furniture was that they kept breaking it, and it's surprising what a youthful spirit will do for the body. Rachael, however, did not see it that way. All she could think of were little brothers, dirty diapers, and no longer being special.

"Didn't you try at all to save me?" Rachael asked, pouting.

"Yes, as best as we could from a flying house," Mrs. Pryce replied sardonically. "We missed you, prophecy moppet. We missed you a lot. Didn't we, Wes?"

"We did indeed," Mr. Pryce said, embracing his daughter. "Don't pout, Rachael. It makes you look bitchy."

"Lord no, never bitchy!" Mrs. Pryce teased. "How could she?"

Mr. Pryce fixed Mrs. Pryce with a look of mock severity, further embarrassing Rachael, who had not expected her triumph rescue and reunion with her parents to be part of a long, lazy afternoon of flirting under the amused eyes of the Bristows and Dr. Abbott's raised eyebrow.

"Strict Neutrality," he reminded her. "Isn't that right, Rachael?"

"Yes, Dad," Rachael said sullenly. "It's just a little hard to swallow when my own parents don't really love me as much as I love them."

With that, Rachael stormed out of the house, both parents following. Of course, to make things worse, there were any number of people waiting to witness her Big Adolescent Scene, which means that Rachael understood that her tragic airs were a bit overblown. Mr. and Mrs. Pryce understood as well, and were in fact a bit embarrassed that they'd forgotten exactly when the house was meant to touch down. When one is dressed as Becky Sharpe as most recently portrayed by Reese Witherspoon, in a red dress with pregnant belly, and your lover has been forced to put on his rattiest pair of jeans and a t-shirt, you are not negotiating from a strong position.

"Is that what this is all about?" asked Mrs. Pryce, hand supporting her stomach. "Are you jealous because there's a little brother on the way?"

Rachel glowered, her face red from unshed tears. "No! It's all about how I suffered for weeks and weeks, worrying that you were in peril, and instead you spent it drinking tea and having a leisurely afternoon shag!" she snarled. "Don't deny it."

"Not denied," Mr. Pryce said, aware he did not look like a proper Classics professor at all. "We worried about you constantly, Rachael, but we knew that you were very clever and resourceful and if you could save us, you would. And we did have a lot of time on our hands...and needed to get reacquainted."

"We're very proud of you," Mrs. Pryce added, breaking off that line of speculation. "Neither of us were worth a damn when it came to defying our employers, and you told them just where to cram it. It's always nice to see you've raised someone better than yourself, you know."

Rachael pouted. "You could try to look a little happier that I'm home," she said. "I was really, REALLY worried."

"We know," Mr. Pryce said. "And we're planning to have a nice family dinner, just the three of us, to talk about the calamities and disasters of the past year. Sound good?"

"Yes," Rachael said. "Yes, it does."

"Then come home, Prophecy Moppet," Mrs. Pryce said, looking rotund and motherly and far too wise for her own good. Much later on, even her arch-nemesis Angel would admit that he was impressed by the commanding maternal air she had learned in her nearly twenty years of practice. "You have nearly a year before you're eighteen, and until then, no matter how tempting it is?"

"I know, I know," Rachael said, entirely defeated by the unexpected and unwanted alliance between her formerly opposed parents, whose dramatic imprisonment in their flying home had brought them closer than ever. "Strict Neutrality."

"That's right," Mr. Pryce agreed, putting an arm around his beleaguered daughter and sweeping her into the house. "Now you see why we were so opposed to you being a prophecy moppet. It just leads to excitement and rebellion."

"Or annoying, self-righteous brooding," Mrs. Pryce said, ignoring the mob of guests looking on curiously. Rachael sighed wistfully. Despite the disastrous nature of her adventures, they had been very satisfying, and to be back in an atmosphere of Strict Neutrality, especially now with a little brother on the way, was almost more of an unfortunate happening than to be Interesting.

Still, it was only eight months until her eighteenth birthday, and Rachael was still Half Evil and Half Good, and certainly no one expected her to stop **being** a Prophecy Moppet quite **all** of the time, did they?


End file.
